Road To Solace
by AelysAlthea
Summary: The first time was an accident. The second time, too - mostly. The third time was stretching the truth a little, but Harry was prepared to stretch just as much as he needed. The fourth time? Even he couldn't pretend anymore. [FULL SUMMARY WITHIN]
1. Chapter 1

**Summary**: The first time was an accident. The second time, too - mostly. The third time was stretching the truth a little, but Harry was prepared to stretch just as much as he needed. The fourth time? Even he couldn't pretend anymore.

There were going to be changes after the war, changes heading into his eighth year. Harry just hadn't anticipated that one such change would involve assuming prime seating in someone else's lap.

~Written for the Draco Tops Harry Fest 2019~

**Rating**: M

**Relationships**: Harry/Draco; Ron/Hermione; Referenced Past Harry/Ginny

**Tags**: Post-Canon, Post-War, Epilogue-What-Epilogue, Eighth Year, PTSD, Insomnia, Panic Attacks, Regrets, Character Development, Absurd Circumstances, Lap-sitting, Touch-starved, Internalised Homophobia, A whole load of angst, but also angst resolution

* * *

**Chapter 1**

The night of September first in the eighth-year tower – the 'Dragon's Nest' as it would be called within a week of school's resumption – was always going to be uncomfortable. War-weary warriors returned to the battlefield, yet this time with wands lowered and set to face a different kind of enemy. The walls were rebuilt, scorch marks were scrubbed away, floors were swept of rubble, and the bodies that looked so small, so helpless in death, were whisked away as though they'd never been there at all. There were no curses or hexes flung to the sound of a barked command, no flaring lights brightening dark skies, no pained cries as those spells connected. The smell of fear was gone, leaving only the ache of smothering grief in its stead. It was almost as though the Battle of Hogwarts had never happened at all.

Almost. Harry didn't think he was the only one to step through the double doors at the front of the castle and pause for a moment on the threshold to take a deep breath. Then another. A third, just for good measure, before he lifted his chin and strode within.

The Dragon's Nest was an old building refurbished for the short, express purpose of housing the returning eighteen-year-olds whose final year of education had been crushed by the weight of Voldemort's war. Surprisingly – or perhaps not surprisingly at all – there were only a handful of students in Harry's year who didn't return. When the feast in the Great Hall drew to a close, when the eighth years wandered in a slow but constant stream towards their new dormitories, he saw the familiar faces of many that he almost expected never to see again.

Seamus Finnegan walked alongside Dean. He was smiling in spite of the sobriety of the feast that evening, nothing if not the picture of confidence and enthusiasm despite that Harry knew his parents had all but demanded he forgo school that year.

Hannah Abbott, quiet and reserved as she'd always been yet somehow now even more so, walked alongside Neville, who seemed to be making an attempt at conversation. From what Harry had heard at the table that evening, her parents were of the same mind as Seamus'.

Michael Corner, who had loudly exclaimed from his old Hufflepuff table that 'nothing and no one could tell him what to do', and that he saw attendance was a show of disloyalty for anyone to have abandoned Hogwarts that year. The Patil twins, shoulder to shoulder, hard-faced in a way that Harry had never seen of them before. Terry Boot and Sue Li, Susan Bones and Justin Finch-Fletchley. So many were in company that Harry hadn't expected more for their number than for who they were.

Mostly, however, were the Slytherins. Or the ex-Slytherins, as had been an announced distinction of the eighth years over dinner. He hadn't expected to see any of them return either, but maybe he should have. With the exception of Goyle, an absence that Harry felt guilty at feeling relieved by, every single one of them had returned. Maybe it was to be expected. Maybe, with the oppressive hatred trained upon anyone with any connection to Death Eaters these days, Hogwarts was the only safe place for them.

Which it would be. Harry would make sure of it. The war was over, but there were still battles to be fought, and people like the Slytherins? Like Malfoy, his gaze lowered to the floor before him, Parkinson, her pug-nosed face for once tucked in an unending flinch, and Zabini, usually so swaggering and confident yet now walking with as much solemnity as his old housemates – they still fought. They were still fighting every day, even if the eighth years that walked around them didn't so much as clutch their wands in wariness.

Harry might not like them, wasn't sure if he'd ever like them, but he would attempt amicability. Malfoy was likely still an arse, even if he hadn't spoken a word throughout the entire feast, Parkinson probably still a cow despite the trembling downward turn of her lips, and Zabini almost certainly still a confident prat even though he didn't look it, but Harry would try. They didn't deserve to be hated so fiercely, or at least he didn't think so. There was too much hatred in the clean-up after Voldemort's destruction as it was. Harry was so goddamned sick of hating.

The Dragon's Nest was small. Distinctly smaller than Gryffindor's tower, though mostly the same in shape and furnishings. With the exception of a lack of gold and red, replaced instead by washed out whites, greys, and blacks, it was almost identical. A monochromatic twin. Stepping into the common room, Harry wasn't the only one who felt conversation die on his lips at the sight of it. Silence hung over the cluster of his classmates like a weighted blanket.

"Bloody hell," Ron muttered, though in the silence it sounded particularly loud. "This is kind of…"

"Boring?" Seamus offered.

"There's literally no colour in here," Dean said. "Whose idea was that?"

"Even the bookshelves are boring," Mandy Brocklehurst said, wandering towards them and raising a hand to a row of hardbacks. She paused before touching them as though fearing to get burned by the unerring line of black books. "This isn't like Ravenclaw Tower at all."

"Or Hufflepuff," Hannah said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.

"Do you think we could ask to be transferred back to the Basement?" Susan said, and though Harry saw a smile touch her lips, it was nowhere near as vibrant as those he'd seen her wear in the past.

Hums of agreement met her words, but they quickly died into more reserved staring. Harry let his gaze drift over the flat planes of the room, the stagnant black curtains, the white rug that already looked a little discoloured, and the wooden desks that somehow looked more grey than brown. On second thought, maybe it wasn't all that much like Gryffindor Tower.

Someone cleared their throat. Harry didn't realise it was Hermione until she took a handful of striding steps forwards and extracted her wand from the sleeve of her robes. "Well," she said, only the deep breath preceding her words bellying her confident tone, "we might as well fix it up a little, right? It's going to be home for a year, after all. Why not add a splash of colour or two?"

Harry felt a shadow of warmth trickle into his chest, almost immediately chewing away at the wash of coldness he hadn't properly realised suffused him from the moment he'd stepped back into Hogwarts' castle. Hermione was far from a vibrant, eccentric person, and of everyone in the room likely favoured the colour palette the most, but she was trying. She'd already turned to the fireplace and cast a spell, an unexpectedly vivid splash of red, purple, and green erupting and immediately setting to burning the logs within.

Harry extracted his own wand. "I reckon that sounds like a good idea," he said, sparing a glance for his idling classmates. More than a few smiles – ghostly and small but still smiles – had arisen at Hermione's prompting. "Anyone know any particularly good colouring charms?"

As it turned out, they did. The ex-Hufflepuffs in particular seemed to have an inventory up their sleeves. In short order, the tower was flooded with sparkling charms, chanted words, and splashes of colour that flew through the air like flung paint. The effect was immediate and brightening more than just visually; at a glance, Harry could see smiles widening on faces and even heard a laugh or two.

And that was only the beginning.

Someone cracked out butterbeer. Someone else conjured flagons of whiskey. Zabini, apparently drawn from his momentary solemnity, seemed to produce bottles of wine from the sleeves of his robes as fluidly as Hermione had drawn her wand. To the sound of more charms, interspersed increasingly with chatter, amber liquid poured, cups were passed around by hand and levitation charms alike, and the sweet smell of liquor chased away the hollow dustiness that had previously filled the room.

The curtains changed colours a dozen times, only settling when there were each such a mish-mash of different shades that it hurt the eyes if stared at for too long. The ceiling was splashed with a mural reminiscent of a remarkably realistic rainbow, and the floor directly beneath a glassy mirror of it. The rugs were fields of green and yellow, the tables seemingly polished to an array of rich teak, and the Ravenclaws seemed to have made it their express duty to colour every book cover in a different shade. It was almost as blinding to look at the bookshelves as it was the curtains.

The room was a mess of colour, but Harry didn't think it was a bad thing. Not in the least. Appallingly poor taste, yes, and the silent glances of the purebloods in the room, likely raised in far more decorous settings, only added to the impression, but it was good. Better. Kind of funny, too, and that humour made it worth all the glaring brightness.

Ron downed drink after drink at Harry's side. Hermione sipped from a bottle and didn't look likely to put it down any time soon. Harry drank, too, and even if he wasn't partial much to drinking – he'd seen too much of what it did to Uncle Vernon to take more than a glass or two on a good day – that evening felt like an exception. Despite the increasingly frequent and increasingly loud laughter, there remained an aura of grief. A twinge of regret. A hint of wistfulness as bodies flopped into the colourful armchairs around the fire, more sprawling upon the grass-green rug, and in the voices that spoke at louder and louder volume either from drunkenness or an attempt to stave off that wistfulness.

Harry drank. Just this once, the exception was entirely necessary.

In short order, lost in the headiness of compensatory colour and Forgetfulness Brew in the form of alcohol, the Dragon's Nest became a buzzing mess of noise. "Let's play some music," someone suggested as the clock-tower stuck nine, and the old gramophone in the corner of the room burst into life. "Anyone got any card games other than Exploding Snap?" someone else asked when ten o'clock passed.

A not-argument began over recolouring the curtains, and they quickly evolved into an even more abrasive mess of shades. Harry couldn't watch the argument ensue of too long; the curtains were already starting to give him a headache.

A cluster of bodies growing increasingly unsteady upon their feet danced to the jaunty music, and Harry was momentarily drawn into the midst. It didn't last long before he managed to extract himself.

A round of poker erupted, and galleons were produced from pockets. More beer, more whiskey, and more wine – unexpectedly the courtesy of Daphne Greengrass rather than Zabini this time – was offered, and bottles emptied so fast it was almost as though they were drained by magic. Someone – probably an ex-Hufflepuff if Harry clung to the stereotypes – conjured a table and bowls of chocolate, sweets, and fruity punch appeared out of nowhere.

And Harry drank. He continued to drink even when the edges of his vision started to go fuzzy.

It took him until twelve o'clock that night to realise that he and his classmates were having a party. A party that was still going, and only rising in volume, intensity, and mayhem the longer it ensued. Three separate clusters of people had disappeared to raid the kitchens – probably the ex-Hufflepuffs again – and there were two independent games of poker being played with increasingly high stakes. The dancers, of which only a few of the original members remained, barely danced at all but managed more of a lazy, staggering sway and bounce. Just as many bodies were sprawled across the floor as occupied the too-little seating.

Harry was one of them. A cluster of ex-Gryffindors was still loosely scattered around him, but the continuity of whatever conversation they'd been having had long since broken. Harry couldn't even remember what they'd been talking about. He sat between Ron and Hermione, as he so often found himself – or he'd thought he did. He hadn't noticed either of them move, but when he lifted his surprisingly heavy head from where he gazed into the dregs of his cup, only Hermione remained at his side. A bottle was still clasped in her hands, though upon squinting at it, Harry was fairly sure it was empty.

Music buzzed in his ears – or maybe that was the voices of those around him. It took three tries to get his voice working loud enough to be heard. "Where's Ron gone?" he asked, though his tongue felt a little too thick and dry to properly enunciate.

Hermione, reclined on her elbows with her eyes closed, didn't answer. She started when Harry nudged her with his elbow. "Huh?" she asked, cracking an eye open.

"Ron?"

Hermione blinked, frowned, then gave an awkward shrug. "Probably eating."

"What?"

"He always eats when he's drunk. A hungry drunk. Always hungry. Always eating crap. Always…" She trailed off into mumbling, and Harry couldn't help but snort. Ron might be typical of a 'hungry drunk', but she filled the role of a sleepy one just as perfectly.

He didn't really need to find Ron. He wasn't hungry, either. And yet, after a moment of slow-minded contemplation, Harry was hauling himself to his feet in search of his friend. Only to pause momentarily as the room seemed to flip upside down.

"Fuck," he muttered.

"Alrigh' there, Harry?" someone asked, the words followed by laughter that could have been at him, with him, or entirely unrelated.

Harry didn't know what direction the voice had come from, so he didn't bother replying. Closing his eyes briefly, squeezing them shut as his head pounded like a drum for reasons he couldn't quite pinpoint, he took a moment to stand and gather his bearings. Was he still holding his cup? He thought he was. Yes, that was definitely a cup still in his hand. That was good. For some reason, Harry decided that was a very, very good thing.

Except that it was empty. That wasn't so good.

Blinking in a useless attempt to clear his eyes, Harry raised his free hand to scrub the blurriness away before glancing around himself. A slow glance, because the tower was apparently a little bit tipsy itself and hadn't decided whether it wanted to stay still or not. With deliberate care, Harry took a shuffling step forwards and began to pick his way over the bodies surrounding him.

"Something smells like puke," he muttered more to himself than anyone else, and didn't expect a reply. It wasn't particularly unexpected itself given that four people had already thrown up that night. Shaking his head – a bad idea, he shouldn't have done that, wouldn't do it again – Harry started in the general direction of the snack bar.

The ex-Ravenclaws he passed were still playing poker, though half of them looked more intent on sipping their drinks or counting their coins than actually playing. Michael was stretched out across the only route across the room, and Harry nearly tripped over Mandy's foot as he stepped over them both. The ex-Slytherins had somehow managed to obtain and keep the majority of the seats around the fireplace, though a handful of dancers had made their way into the centre of the suite's ring and looked to be trying to pull their reluctant dorm mates to their feet.

Or were they reluctant? _They're still assholes, _arose as a random thought in Harry's mind, and for a moment all he could think of was Parkinson's sneer, and Bulstrode's glare, and Malfoy's slinking flight after the Death Eaters as they fled from Hogwarts at the end of his sixth year. Except that, even with those thoughts arising, when Harry managed to focus his attention upon Malfoy – was it Malfoy? Yes, surely it was. No one else was quite that blond – he didn't feel angry. He felt… he felt…

"I feel kind of like I'm going to puke, too," he said to himself, and scrubbed at his face again, as much to slap himself awake as to knead at the throbbing thud of what felt a little like a headache but a little not. Maybe eating something would help. Maybe Ron did have the right idea. Picking up his excessively heavy feet, Harry restarted his roundabout route towards the bar.

Except that the ex-Hufflepuffs apparently considered any passer-by victim to be abducted into their midst.

In the centre of the ring of couches, Harry felt someone grab his hand and spin him into a twirl. Someone, their face strangely blurry until Harry realised his glasses had slipped and fixed them, made a staggering attempt at dancing. Susan, Harry thought. Susan, who had apparently regained some of her enthusiasm with a bellyful of drink. The music wasn't even particularly suited to dancing, and Susan was so out of time with it that it didn't even seem relevant.

"No thank you," Harry tried to say as Susan jiggled his arms, all but tossing his to and fro with each motion. It was the most he could manage, and even that was garbled.

"Hey, let loose a little, Harry," someone said behind him. When Harry turned to glance over his shoulder, blinking away a return of the blurriness, he staggered and all but fell over.

"Whoa, careful there. Careful."

"Sorry," Harry said, giving an apologetic pat to the shoulder of whoever he'd grabbed. It was definitely becoming harder to make out faces.

"Take a seat, mate, yeah?"

"Trying to –"

"You're trying to?"

"Trying to find Ron," Harry said, but he couldn't even hear his own words. The tower was dancing itself, the rainbow ceiling sparkling overly bright, and the music had taken on a skewed, hollow tone as though Harry was hearing it through water. Had someone broken the gramophone?

Someone steadied him with a hand on his shoulder in return. Someone else nudged him away from the mix of dancers who weren't even dancing properly anymore. A step, another guiding hand that seemed more like a hand to hold him up, and then Harry was staggering free from what felt like too many people. Only to trip over something – someone? A foot? His own foot – and tumble forwards belly first.

"Ow," Harry said, only half aware that he'd landed on a chair. "Oops."

"'Scuse me?"

Struggling – and failing – to right himself, Harry turned his head to the voice above him. Someone was already in the seat. Double oops. In spite of himself and his headache, his twinging belly that promised him that he was more than likely to puke shortly, and the lingering heaviness of sadness that lined every thought, it seemed abruptly funny.

"Sorry," Harry said, even if he was only half apologetic.

"You're sitting on me, Potter."

Harry blinked. His eyes really were very blurry. Had he lost his glasses? "Malfoy?"

"Mm."

"Oops."

"You already said that."

"Can I -?" Struggling to find his arms, his hands – and dammit, he just realised he'd lost his cup somewhere – Harry fumbled to sit up. He failed dismally once more. "Um, do you mind if I borrow your chair for a sec?"

"My chair?"

"Your, um, your lap." Harry snorted at his own thoughts, then again as he realised he'd actually spoken it aloud. "I think I've lost my feet."

Hands fumbling, pushing himself up on his knees and elbows, he grasped onto the warm firmness of Malfoy's legs, his shoulders, something hard and bony that was probably an arm, as much as the arm of the chair. "Sorry, sorry, sorry," he muttered absently with each fumbled attempt.

"You still have your feet," Malfoy said from above him.

"Huh?"

"They're still attached."

"Oh." Harry blinked, but it didn't help much. "That's good. I think I'm drunk."

"You think?"

"Yeah." Another attempt at pushing himself upright failed as Harry accidentally grasped Malfoy's knee. "Sorry. Again. Sorry."

"I don't care. I found your feet, but you can just use my lap-chair until you do, too."

The sentence was a jumbled mess, funny to Harry's ears until it made sense, and then it was just unexpectedly relieving. "Oh. Um. Thanks." He wasn't sure about finding his feet, especially seeing as he wasn't even sure where his hands were anymore. "Are you drunk too? I think it would be good if you were. I think – yeah, I think that would be good."

_Very good,_ Harry thought, or someone else thought and Harry just heard it. It was hard to tell in the Wizarding world, he supposed. _I used to hate Malfoy, after all. He was a git. Is a git. Was. Probably better if he's drunk, too. _

Was Malfoy drunk? Harry thought he'd replied, but he couldn't remember.

Huffing with laughter more at himself than anything in particular, Harry gave up trying to push himself upright. Malfoy's lap-chair was surprisingly comfortable, though maybe that was just compared to the floor?

"Thanks," he managed, before all but flopping onto his belly. His eyes slipped closed, or maybe his vision just faded; Harry wasn't sure and didn't really care. "You're a real champ."

Malfoy snorted, but somehow it sounded more like a laugh in Harry's ears. Yes, he was definitely drunk, he realised, and this was definitely a party, and it was definitely out of hand. But he didn't mind. Didn't care. Didn't care either that he'd meant to find Ron, though he couldn't remember why he was looking for him anymore, and didn't care that he was likely going to puke in short order.

Right then, abusing the likely disgruntled Malfoy to the best of his incapacitated ability, Harry was more than happy to stay put. He was… surprisingly comfortable. Almost comfortable enough to sleep. Curling in upon himself, legs unconsciously tucking, Harry decided that was a very good idea.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

A week into his eighth year, Harry had learned a number of things that he hadn't previously considered. More than just that he didn't think he ever wanted to drink again after the first night back that he remembered all too clearly.

One was that Hogwarts had recovered only superficially. The wounds that marred the stone and reflected those upon the students and staff had been treated and covered, but they were still there. Another was that, though those wounds remained, every day they seemed to heal just a little more. Or maybe those who bore them simply learned to accommodate them a little better.

Harry learned that the divisions between the houses, the stark lines that had once defined them, seemed to have become blurred. Those that remained in Slytherin house still bore a distinct quietness, something that resonated with pain and even a little guilt, but they weren't hated. Harry suspected that maybe they were the ones that hated themselves the most. It was a strange possibility, but more apparent by the day.

He learned that McGonagall was a stronger woman than he'd even given her credit for. That the professors as a whole were stronger, even if Slughorn spoke with a bit of a quaver sometimes and the new Defence professor seemed to be at constant war with the precedent set before her. The students themselves were stronger, too, and it was apparent from the murmur of chatter at mealtimes that rose into real conversation and even natural laughter over the span of a single week.

Harry also learned, realising with a deduction that was echoed by the sceptical mutters of his dorm mates, that no one had quite anticipated just how many eighth years would return that year. That not only was their tower, the so-named Dragon's Nest, just a little too small for them but that the table provided in the Great Hall for their use, a table set before and below the dais of the Head Table, was too small as well.

Entering the Great Hall on Friday morning, Harry yawned behind his hand. At his side, Ron barely seemed awake, and even Hermione was walking with heavy steps. Their classes had started with a bang, forcing each and every one of them to hit the ground running, and Harry hadn't realised what a difference a whole year without school and its routine would make upon his efficiency.

Study was bloody hard.

Wandering up the aisle towards the Little Head Table, as he'd had heard it called by some of the younger students, Harry waved absently to the Gryffindor table where Ginny sat. She caught his eye with a smile and waved back, though was distracted almost instantly by the girl at her side who drew her back into their conversation.

Harry bit back a sigh. Whatever had existed between himself and Ginny had passed. It was too confusing, maybe too soon or too late, to decide if he was saddened by it, but that fact was blatantly apparent. He still loved her, and he knew she still cared for him, but more than that? Some things it seemed simply didn't seem capable of surviving the war. Some loves. Some hatreds, too.

Almost against his will, Harry glanced back towards the Little Head Table. His gaze drew unerringly towards Malfoy's white-blond head, caught for a moment, then detached as he shook his own head. The ex-Slytherins were a little confusing, to say the least, with not a single one of them so much as raising their hackles at a passing comment that would have once started a fight. Granted, few muttered such imprecations and accusations even under their breaths anymore, with almost unanimous consensus holding fast to group support and a recovery mentality even for those once excluded, but even so. It was a little unexpected. More than a little.

Just as the fact that Harry remembered more clearly than he'd care to admit that he'd all but climbed into Malfoy's lap on the first evening in the Dragon's Nest. Or that Harry had promptly fallen to sleep. Or that one of the most prominent memories of doing so wasn't shame, or discomfort, or even embarrassment but that it had been… surprisingly comfortable.

Giving a mental shake of his head, Harry glanced back towards his friends where he'd only half realised they were sharing a discussion. "What's this?" he asked, catching sight of Ron's face scrunched in displeasure.

Ron switched his attention from a chiding Hermione towards him. "You know we had a Transfiguration essay due this afternoon."

Harry blinked. "Oh. Yeah, I remember. I think I'm mostly done."

Ron's face scrunched further. "When were you doing that?"

"In Defence yesterday."

"That's what you were writing?" Ron asked, eyebrows snapping upwards, even as Hermione clicked her tongue and chided him in turn.

"You should be doing Defence work in Defence, Harry."

"To be fair, Hermione, I doubt anyone's really going to tell Harry-bloody-Potter he needs to learn more about Defence Against the Dark Arts."

It was Harry's turn to pull a face, though Hermione had leapt upon Ron's words, diving headfirst into explaining just why theoretical and practical were very, very different types of learning, and he doubted either of them noticed. Turning away from them, he picked up his pace a little to step around the pair of junior girls headed down the aisle towards them, offering them both a smile that they returned in kind as they passed. He caught a word or two as he did so, a brief "try out for the team" that was nothing if not utterly normal conversation, and unexpectedly halted into a flux of consideration. Rather than listen to Ron defending the merits of experience over book knowledge, and Hermione arguing the exact opposite, Harry turned towards the Head Table.

"I'll be back in a second," Harry said over his shoulder, though he doubted either Ron or Hermione heard him. Picking up his pace, he trotted the rest of the way down the hall, skirting past another cluster of younger students as they rose to their feet, and rounded the Little Head Table to where the professors were seated.

It was only half-full, a speckling of the professors choosing to partake their meals alone and away from the near-constant company of students, but McGonagall was there. With the hall bubbling with noise, peak breakfast hour living up to its name, Harry doubted they would have been able to hold much of a conversation with one another anyway. As he climbed up the steps, he caught the eye of a number of them, shared a nod or two, and stopped before McGonagall.

"Hi, Professor," he said by way of greeting.

McGonagall lowered her fork onto what remained of her eggs. "Potter," she said, raising a napkin to wipe her lips. "Good morning."

"Hi. Yeah, morning. I was wondering, do you mind if I just chatted to you for a sec?"

McGonagall's lips twitched, and Harry recognised it as the suppression of a smile that he would have once misread for annoyance. "I believe we already are."

"Right." Harry didn't bother hiding his own smile. He wondered absently why McGonagall did – he thought they were probably past that in whatever relationship they shared – but supposed she had an image to maintain as the Headmistress. "Just a thought, but I was wondering, is quidditch going to be running this year?"

McGonagall's lips pursed slightly. It was as good as a frown, and Harry was reminded that, at least when it came to the Hogwarts community, she was one of the most dedicated supporters of the sport. "I should certainly think so," she said.

"Great." Harry smiled again, then bit his lip, then struggled to maintain that smile. "So, I was wondering…"

"About captaincy and team positions, I suppose?"

Harry's nod was a little stilted.

McGonagall settled back in her chair. Her hands folded over one another on the table before her. "What are your preferences, Potter?"

Harry blinked. "My preferences?"

"Yes. Do you have intentions to continue playing? Is it your hope that you'll step back into your position as captain and seeker? You wouldn't be filling anyone's shoes given the circumstances of the Gryffindor team last year, if that's your concern."

Harry opened his mouth to reply but closed it almost immediately. He'd thought about quidditch. He really had, and quite a bit over the past few days, but not quite as thoroughly as to be able to provide answers to McGonagall's questions. Gnawing on his bottom lip, he glanced absently over his shoulder in the direction of Gryffindor table. He could make out Ginny's bright hair, her head still turned in avid discussion with her friend.

Did he want to keep playing quidditch? Yes. Of course he did. There were few things he loved more in the world than flying, and the game added an extra layer of excitement and competitiveness that Harry had never experienced in a sport before. And yet, after everything, coming back to Hogwarts and resuming the position and status he'd once held… Somehow, it didn't feel right.

"I don't… know," Harry said. "I don't think…"

McGonagall was quiet for a moment, waiting with respectful silence, before straightening in her seat. "Perhaps, with the workload you are to be buried beneath this year, keeping your extracurricular activities to a minimum may be a wise decision."

"Other people keep up quidditch in their final year," Harry said without much force, still watching Ginny. "Oliver Wood did."

"Yes, he did."

"Plenty of people can…" Harry trailed off. He truly loved quidditch, and a part of him was itched to climb onto a broom at the first chance he got. And yet…

"None of those people fought and won a war less than six months prior, though, Potter," McGonagall said.

In spite of the potential horror behind her words, Harry found himself smiling a little once more as he turned back to his headmistress. "You make it sound so exceptional."

"Yes, well." McGonagall's lips twitched again, and Harry was sure it wasn't in annoyance this time. "You can still think about it, Potter. The season isn't set to start just yet."

"Right."

"Give it some time."

"Okay."

"And get back to me."

Harry nodded. He spared a final glance over his shoulder before taking a moment more to meet McGonagall's eyes. "As a suggestion, if you happen to need it, Ginny would make a brilliant captain."

McGonagall didn't even try to hide her satisfaction this time. "That she would. I'm glad we're on the same page."

Nodding again, a little saddened yet somehow also satisfied, Harry turned from the Head Table to that placed just below it. Only to pause halfway down the dais stairs, scanning along the length of the parallel benches.

_Well, fuck, _he thought, propping his hands upon his hips. _Did everyone decide to bombard the Great Hall for dinner at once or something?_ Not a single spot remained, and some places even held two people. Hermione was practically on Ron's lap, Lavender entirely on Parvati's, and Seamus wasn't in a seat at all but instead had slung himself over Dean's back to both chat to him and lean over his shoulder to pick at a bowl of grapes. The small cluster of ex-Slytherins were a little more spaced out, the flinch response that entailed not even the consciously aware students could help giving them minute extra distance, but it wasn't much.

"Professor," Harry said over his shoulder, continuing down the stairs, "just as another suggestion, I think this table needs more seats."

"I couldn't agree more, Potter," McGonagall called after him, and he could have sworn a hint of laughter underlaid her words.

Shaking his head, Harry continued up the length of the table. He tapped Ron's shoulder as he passed, gesturing along the benches in vague indication, and left him with eyebrow raised and question half spoken to continue to what little spaces were available.

It was going to be a little awkward. Maybe more than a little. But Harry figured that he and every other student had to start somewhere, didn't they? If they were going to remedy the situation of the still-present but less pronounced ostracism of certain members of the student body, active steps would need to be taken. Besides, the eighth years had already started, hadn't they? What with the party of their first evening back, and – and –

_And the fact that I accidentally slept on top of Malfoy for half the night. _A hint of warmth pooled in Harry's cheeks, but he ignored it. It wasn't like Malfoy had said anything about it anyway. Once, maybe, he might have ensured that Harry never heard the end of it. Once, he probably would have kicked up a fuss and practically thrown Harry across the room if he'd so much as bumped into him, let alone tripped and fallen into his lap.

But not anymore. Malfoy, it seemed, was trying a little bit too, even if most of that trying took the form of remaining silent where he would have once spluttered with indignation and spat curses. That, and the fact that he 'd mostly likely been as drunk as Harry that first night.

When he reached the cluster of almost ominously quiet classmates, Harry ignored the slightly widened eyes and unblinking stares that immediately locked onto him. Prodding Malfoy's shoulder much as he had Ron's, he was almost certain his smile remained friendly as he gestured him to shuffle aside. "Shove up a bit, would you?"

Malfoy stared up at him. His eyes were widened just as mutely but distinctly as Parkinson's across from him, though he quickly gathered himself to reinstate the blank façade he'd worn almost constantly since returning to school. "Shove up?" he asked more mildly than Harry had ever heard him speak to him before.

Harry shrugged. "There's not a whole lot of space anywhere else." Sliding a leg over the bench, he spared a glance for Zabini at his other side. "Unless you object?"

Zabini raised his own shoulder in a shrug, and Malfoy didn't reply, so Harry wriggled himself onto the bench. Or attempted to; he seemed to have drastically over-estimated how much room was actually available.

"Sorry," Harry muttered as he found himself half sitting on Malfoy's lap for the second time in a week. He shared a sidelong glance with Malfoy, chewed the inside of his lip for a moment, before half rising again. "I think I'll just –"

"It's no bother," Malfoy said, waving a hand in a grandiose manner that was so unexpectedly reminiscent of the stuffy pureblood Harry had known him as most of his life that he almost laughed. "It wouldn't be the first time."

A touch of renewed warmth rose in Harry's cheeks, and he switched his glance towards Parkinson across from him, to Zabini at his other side. Zabini gave a small smirk. "Don't worry," he said. "We already knew about it."

"It's kind of hard to miss when you wake up to it shoved in your face," Parkinson said without heat, though her stare was trained intently upon Harry.

"Right," Harry said, glancing again towards Malfoy. "Sorry about that, too."

Malfoy brushed it aside again with a flick of his hand. "I told you, I don't care."

"He doesn't mind," Zabini echoed.

"That's what I said."

"No, you said –"

"Shut up, Zabini," Parkinson said, and the sound of a thud gave Harry the startling impression that she'd kicked him under the table. Zabini's shit-eating grin, a little tamer than those he might have once worn but sincere nonetheless, only added to the impression.

Harry stared at him. He stared at Parkinson. He stared at Malfoy, too, who seemed to be perfectly happy to resume picking at his breakfast with dainty little stabs of his fork despite the fact that Harry was practically sitting on him. A little along the table, Theodore Nott shot him a look before quickly looking away, while Greengrass and Bulstrode exchanged identical glances of raised eyebrows and pursed lips.

Harry was missing something, he thought. He was almost certain of it.

"Right," he said, mostly to himself. "Right, then, that's… okay."

It was surprisingly unremarkable thenceforth, a breakfast much like any other. The only difference was that, without quite knowing how it happened, before he'd even finished his plate Harry found himself sitting almost completely in Malfoy's lap. 'How' seemed to be a bit of a confusing sequence of shifts and shuffles, but 'why' was a little less explainable. Why the hell Malfoy hadn't shoved him off with a huff, mostly. Why Harry didn't shove himself off, too.

He didn't rightly know. He didn't like Malfoy, even if he knew he didn't – couldn't – hate him as much as he once had. All he knew was that sitting so close to someone, the warmth of someone else's body head against him and the casual bump of an elbow, the shift of a knee beneath him, the brush of a shoulder against his back…

It was kind of nice. Nice, and come from the most unexpected of places.

* * *

A/N: thank you to all of the lovely people who read and reviewed last chapter! I feel so blessed!  
I'll be trying to update as often as possible, so shouldn't be too long until the next chapter. Please let me know what you think if you have a second, and I'll see you next time!


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

By three weeks into term, routine had firmly settled. It was no less manic, and Harry was realising more and more each day just what an impact a year of listless hiding and running did to his education. He'd never really cared about his grades, but that was before. That was when fighting, defeating, and surviving Voldemort came first and school second. He hadn't realised just how firmly he'd subconsciously placed everything else on the sidelines until it was pushed to the forefront.

Harry wasn't smart. Not for books, and not for studying. He knew that, which made keeping up and fixing what a necessary absence had created all the harder. Even so, he could do without Hermione's incessant sighs and reminders that they should "really knuckle down and study a little more". It was even more tiresome when Harry was doing as much knuckling down as he knew how.

Luckily for Harry, Ron took up the mantle of arguing for the both of them.

"Look, it's not like I'm not trying, Hermione," Ron was saying as they stepped into the shadowed depths of their Potions classroom. Even Slughorn's placement of two whole years couldn't chase away the dampening aura of the place. "I just suck at studying."

"That may be," Hermione began.

"It's 'cause I'm dumb."

Hermione cuffed Ron lightly on the back of the head. "You are not dumb. Don't you dare say that. You're one of the smartest people I know, even if you're not good at studying."

Ron grumbled something under his breath, but he didn't argue the point further. If anything, Harry thought he seemed rather pleased by her scolding; the tips of his ears turned pink, and though he still scowled, it looked a little softer around the edges than it had been.

_They're still dancing around each other,_ Harry thought with a mental roll of his eyes. While he and Ginny might not be crossing the bridge to get back together – a possibility less and less likely every day and something Harry was growing increasingly fine with – others weren't. Ron and Hermione clearly didn't know how to handle themselves or each other, but there was still something there. Definitely.

Following in their wake, Harry dropped his books onto the desk and glanced briefly around the room. It was already half-full, and Slughorn sat on his usual perch at the front desk, leaning back in his chair with hands clasped across his belly and fingers tapping one another. When Harry met his gaze, he smiled placidly and tipped his head towards him in a slight bow as he did every time they saw one another.

He wasn't the only one, and Harry doubted it would ever not feel disconcerting. That hint of respect, that recognition, was unasked for and excessive in his opinion, but no one seemed inclined to slow in their modest displays of gratitude. Before he'd come back to school, Harry could barely walk down the street without been assaulted by handshakes, bowing heads, and whispers in tones hissing with awe.

It was downright uncomfortable and half of the reason that Harry had returned to school at all. Maybe more than half, even. At least most people at Hogwarts had been through the Battle too. They still saw him as the person he'd been before Voldemort's defeat – or mostly did. People like Slughorn, like the wide-eyed first years, and a speckling of other students didn't seem quite capable of that.

Dropping into his chair, Harry folded his arms across the desk and propped his chin onto his forearms. He absently scanned the room, watching as more students entered and sought their own seats, barely listening to the not-fight that Ron and Hermione were still holding. Across the room, in their usual seats despite the disregard for old house divisions, the three Slytherins that took Potions sat in silent company. Harry watched as Malfoy flipped through his textbook with none of the distractedness that Harry would have himself. When Malfoy did it he actually looked like he was reading.

_Well, he always was good at Potions, _Harry thought, noting with continuing absentmindedness that it didn't gnaw at him as it once would have to admit to one of Malfoy's better qualities. _Just about every subject, actually. I know I beat him at Defence, but in everything else… he was always up there with Hermione._

It wasn't the first time Harry had found himself watching Malfoy from across the room. In the Great Hall, across the Dragon's Nest common room, in class – he didn't know why, but curiosity niggled at him. Malfoy was a mystery, and not only because he was different to how he'd been months before. There was the fact that he only really spoke to his fellow ex-Slytherins unless someone spoke to him first, but in those instances he always replied neutrally enough, if with as few words as possible. That he didn't seem too fond of picking fights anymore – or at all, as it were, which Harry was silently grateful for. He didn't know if he'd be up to maintaining that level of animosity either.

Malfoy didn't sneer at Ron, or look down his nose at Hermione with mutters of "Mudblood" slipping through his twisted lips whenever they were close enough for her to hear. He didn't hold his head high with his old aloof arrogance, and Harry had noticed a distinct lack of peacock-strutting of late. Granted, being accused of standing on the wrong side of the war, not to mention losing both his parents to incarceration in quick succession, had to have a significant impact on anyone, but… still. Harry hadn't expected it. Not really.

And then there was the Thing. The Thing that Harry didn't know what to call. The Thing that had only happened once – or twice, if he counted his drunken stumble – but that still played upon Harry's mind whenever he stepped into the Great Hall. McGonagall had made good her agreement and extended the Little Head Table and its benches, so the crammed-like-sardines-in-a-can effect was erased, but sometimes Harry could still feel it.

The comfortable warmth of someone so close. The weight of someone sitting behind him, around him, even if it was an offhanded and unwanted proximity on Malfoy's part. The gentle shift of a body against him, the nudge of arms accidentally brushing, the automatic adjustment to compensate for movement – it was something that took up far more of Harry's mind than it should have. Far more than he really wanted, too.

Was he that touch starved? Hermione had said something to that effect a long time ago when she'd been made aware of the tip of the iceberg of Harry's life with the Dursleys. "It's understandable, really," she'd said, looping an arm around his shoulders that had felt as dutiful as it was comforting. "Giving hugs, comforting with a hug or a handhold, touching –"

"Touching?"

"You know what I mean. It's nice. It feels good." She'd smiled a little self-deprecatingly, and Harry hadn't known why until she shrugged awkwardly and continued. "As you can probably tell, it's not exactly the most comfortable thing for me specifically, but for everyone else? Did you know that scientists suspect the effect of physical contact actually has significant beneficial physiological effects? I was reading this paper a few months ago…"

Harry had never thought about it like that. Touching. Just touching, and not necessarily in the way that immediately sprang to mind when the word was mentioned. When he really thought about it, though… Yes, Harry supposed he did like it. It felt awkward, and he sometimes didn't know if he was doing it right, or for too long, or – or if maybe it was annoying to other people, but holding Ginny's hand? When they'd sat against one another, Ginny leaning into his shoulder, of between his own legs and reclining against his chest?

It felt nice. Good. Warm, and comfortable, and somehow fragile, as if moving too fast or shifting in the wrong way would shatter it instantly. Truthfully, Harry had never thought of it in so many words even when Hermione had explained her opinion years before, but it rose in his memory when he contemplated Malfoy.

Sitting with – no, on – Malfoy was weird. Weird because Malfoy hadn't immediately protested, but also because it felt nice. Because Harry didn't like Malfoy. He really didn't hate him anymore, but that was different to liking. But it was… comfortable to sit on his knee, to curl up on his lap, to lean 'accidentally' against him when Malfoy leaned forwards and around him to reach for his glass of pumpkin juice.

Maybe Harry was the weird one. Maybe there was something wrong with him. What kind of a person even considered doing such a thing with a classmate, let alone an old schoolyard rival?

Apparently Harry. Harry did. Yes, he was definitely weird.

"Is that everyone?"

Slughorn's voice interrupted Harry's absent staring and, shaking himself, he straightened from his slouch. Slughorn had hauled himself to his feet to totter across the room, planting himself before the blackboard with hands clasped behind his back. After a moment of silence, he nodded to himself and continued.

"Right-o, so the research report that I mentioned on Monday – we'll be beginning that today." Gesturing to a standing table positioned along the side of the room, a table Harry had barely noticed when he'd entered, he beamed at the class. "Samples are one to a pair. I need a full analysis of the ingredients within the sample, but independent fifty-inch reports from the both of you. The proceeding potion you'll be brewing between you, though – that will be a joint effort. Understood?"

A research report. Ingredient analysis. Wonderful. Harry had almost forgotten Slughorn had mentioned it earlier in the week. Slumping back onto his folded arms, Harry glanced sideways as Hermione's hand predictably shot into the air.

"Yes, Miss Granger?" Slughorn asked.

"Will the samples be of a seventh-year composition calibre, or are they limited in intensity and complexity given the analysing basis of the report?"

"Are you asking for specifics, Granger?"

"A ballpark would be good enough. Just a vague direction so we can work out it we need to do a Lunar Analysis for the higher-grade potions and have to time it, or…"

She continued, speaking at such a clipped, rapid rate that most of her words went over Harry's head. He exchanged a glance with Ron around her, though Ron was smiling with smirking fondness. Harry shook his head to himself. Ron really had become quite smitten. He should make his feelings known already. Honestly, it was almost embarrassing to watch.

When Hermione had exhausted her questions – for she was the only one organised enough to have the forethought – Slughorn swept a gaze over the room and nodded, his satisfied smile returning. "Alright, then," he said. "Off you go. Numbers are even, so partnership should be easy enough. I would prefer groups of mixed competency, if you would, but…"

He trailed off with a slight shrug before turning back to his desk. He was settled and leaning backwards, hands refolded across his belly, before most of the class had even risen to their feet.

Harry was a little slower to climb towards his own than Hermione and Ron alongside him. So that was why he'd pushed thought of the research report to the back of his mind. Shrugging his resignation aside, he met the twin gazes of his friends who in turn eyed him with matching frowns.

"You two are together, I take it?" he asked.

Ron glanced at Hermione, shifting between his feet, and Hermione opened her mouth to reply but took a huffing pause before speaking. "We could… work something out between us." She glanced at Ron in return. "I mean, if you two wanted to -?"

"Don't worry about it." Harry piled his discarded books together and slung his bag over his shoulder. He spared them both a smile. "Catch you after class, 'kay?"

He didn't glance over his shoulder again as he crossed the room. He didn't really want to see the pity that would be painting their faces, Hermione's tinged with concern and Ron's with guilt. It was far from being the first time they'd had to divide their trio, but it had always been Harry and Ron working together.

He wouldn't do that to them. Not now, when they were both so fumbling and awkwardly struggling to cleave together without tripping over their own feet.

That Harry found his own feet leading him to the Slytherin table was only partially surprising. The numbers worked out, after all, and when he considered the class as a whole… the ex-Slytherins weren't ostracised anymore, or at least no more than they afflicted upon themselves, but wariness and awkwardness still radiated from their corner of the room. Harry had already crossed the dividing line a handful of times that year, spoken up when he could even if he didn't really want to, if only to set an example for others to follow. It was a strange phenomenon, but if he'd learned anything in the past few months it was that people watched him whether he wanted them to or not. They watched him and, sometimes, they even followed. He may as well make the most of the unwanted attention.

"Hey," he said by way of greeting, glancing between Malfoy, Parkinson, and Zabini. "You're stuck for numbers too?"

All three of them snapped their attention towards him, as blank-faced as one another. Or a little less blank-faced than they'd been three weeks before, he supposed. Parkinson's lips thinned slightly, tellingly, and Zabini cocked his head like a curious bird. Malfoy blinked hooded eyes, lips twitching briefly before he spoke.

"We are." He darted a glance over Harry's shoulder before resettling upon his Harry. "Would you care to pair with one of us?"

Harry shrugged, adjusting the books in his arms. "Whoever's fine. It's just a project, right?"

"Right," Malfoy said quietly.

"It doesn't matter who, but fair warning, I suck at Potions."

Unexpectedly, Zabini uttered a bark of laughter. He clamped a hand over his mouth immediately as both Parkinson and Malfoy snapped their gazes towards. Zabini didn't seem to care but to flick them both a glance before eyeing Harry once more. "Yeah, we know," he said. "You took remedial Potions in fifth year, didn't you?"

A flicker of annoyance fluttered to life within Harry, and a snapping retort rose upon his tongue. He brushed it aside with surprisingly little effort and shrugged again. "I didn't, actually."

"You -?"

"Snape was trying to teach me Occlumency. It didn't stick 'cause he was as shit at teaching it as he was Potions, but whatever. No disrespecting the dead or anything. I'm sure he was a great bloke."

For one suspended moment, the class swirling around their frozen quartet as everyone made their way to the samples table, no one spoke. Then Parkinson snorted, Zabini snickered, and Malfoy cleared his throat.

"Right," Malfoy said. "Of course. I suppose that makes… sense."

"If you'd like," Harry said, brushing the revelation aside with more casualness than he felt. "I still suck at Potions, though."

"Except in sixth year."

"Huh?"

Malfoy raised his gaze towards him, returned to its hooded detachedness. "Sixth year. You weren't quite so appalling."

It was such a backhanded compliment that Harry almost thought it was a criticism. He found himself swallowing a smile a moment later, however; Malfoy was still a bit of a prat, it seemed. "Didn't think you noticed."

Malfoy cleared his throat again. Dropping his gaze, he gathered his own books and rose to his feet. "Yes, well. "He threw a glance sideways, then over his shoulder. "Shall we use the back table, then? There's not really enough space for two to work at this bench."

Shrugging, nodding, Harry stepped past him and led the way to the back of the room. There were more than enough spare tables, but Harry had always preferred the far back. Only Hermione's insistence had them constantly at the very front, after all.

They made short work of setting up, unexpectedly efficient as Harry lifted one of the ancient microscopes from under the table and got to work setting it up while Malfoy retrieved their sample. Harry almost expected them to dissolve into an argument, even with Malfoy's quietness and Harry's disregard for arguing these days, but they didn't. Within moments, Malfoy was smearing a transparent dish with a gelatinous scoop of their sample and sidling up to the illuminated microscope.

It wasn't the first potions analysis they'd done. Granted, Harry hadn't ever taken a look at one and really paid attention to what he was doing, and with a year between himself and his last real Potions experiment he was more than a little rusty. But Malfoy clearly knew what he was doing, and as he settled himself atop the stool, scooting up to the microscope and murmuring a vaguely suggestive "you can start looking for potions with peppermint essence, if you want. I can smell it" he got to work.

Harry watched him for a moment. A long moment, in which Malfoy seemed nothing if not entirely oblivious to being observed. Then Harry drew his gaze around the room instead, noting the huddles of pairs. He spared a glance for Ron and Hermione where they looked like they were already arguing about something, before turning back to his desk. Reading. It wasn't his forte, and was far from being his preferred method of learning, but he tugged his textbook towards himself nonetheless. Hermione's nagging had always been more annoying than anything, but he thought he might actually listen to her instruction in this instance.

The class buzzed at a muted volume around him. The clatter of vials, the shuffle of feet, the murmur of voices, mostly bored and mostly raised in questioning speculation. Elbows propped on the table on either side of his open textbook, cradling his head in a hand, Harry flicked through the pages. He scanned briefly through each ingredient's list and dog-earing those Malfoy's brief mention had deemed relevant. He'd never noticed how many potions contained peppermint essence before.

It was mind-numbing work, but short and simple. By the time Harry reached the end of the textbook, over two dozen potions were tagged and the class buzz had settled into mellow distractedness. Voices ebbed and flowed, and a glance around the room again found more than a few clearly caught up in conversation not of the studious kind. Ron was leaning with his back against the desk, rocking on his chair, while Hermione peered through their microscope, but they appeared to be chatting too. As he watched, far from arguing anymore, Hermione said something and Ron grinned goofily.

Glancing aside, Harry settled his gaze back upon Malfoy. He'd hardly moved since he'd begun his study through the lens, but he'd produced a minute spatula from somewhere, held a probe in his other hand, and was prodding at the congealed slime on the dish before him. Harry spared the potion smear a brief glance, the congealed mass of faintly metallic purple barely visible, before resettling on Malfoy once more.

It was strange, in a way, to see him without the familiar film of loathing. It had been a long time since he'd hated him, Harry knew, but the first time he'd properly looked. Malfoy sat with back straight and his head slightly bowed, utterly focused. Faint spots of pink were the only colour in his cheeks, and Harry could make out the edge of a frown tugging his eyebrows downward, his lips along with them, though he didn't seem angry. Not even annoyed. Rather, even as Harry watched, he drew away from the microscope with a soft harrumph Harry wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been standing an arm's length away.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked.

Malfoy twitched. Any other year, any other day, even, Harry might have thought it was with a knee-jerk flinch of distaste, a recoil from Harry's very voice. For whatever reason, however, Harry didn't think that was it this time. Rather, Malfoy turned from the microscope and regarded him for a moment before answering.

"Do you actually want to know?" he asked.

Harry frowned. "Do I… want to know what the potion is, you mean?"

Malfoy frowned a little himself. He glanced back to the microscope, shifted slightly in his seat, then raised his hand in that fluttering, disregarding wave Harry had seen from him before. It was characteristic enough of his old prat-ish self that Harry had to bite back a smirk.

"Sure," Malfoy said. "If you'd like. I just figured you wouldn't really care to participate."

Harry frowned again. "Why? It's our project."

"You never used to work in Potions when you could help it."

Frown deepening, Harry pushed himself up from his seat and folded his arms instead across his chest. Malfoy might be correct in saying that, but it was still a little vexing to hear the assumption made. Even more so when Harry had decided that, for the first time in his student life, he was actually going to make an attempt to study properly.

Stepping towards Malfoy, Harry sidled into the narrow space between his stool and the desk and, almost before he realised he was doing it, perched on the edge of Malfoy's knees. Wrapping a hand around the microscope, he leaned over the lens and peered through, stalwartly ignoring Draco's rigid silence behind him.

Not that the silence lasted long. They were a little removed from the rest of the class, positioned as they were at the back of the room, but Malfoy still lowered his voice when he spoke. "What exactly are you doing?"

"Looking at the sample," Harry said, squinting slightly at the smear. He hadn't any particular skill for eyeballing potions, but it was certainly more enjoyable – and more comprehensible – than reading endless pages of notes from long-dead potioneers. Not that he was really focusing upon the potion, the little flecks of black, the slight film that gave it the metallic sheen. Maybe it had been presumptuous – no, it was definitely presumptuous – but Harry couldn't help but take the opportunity that didn't quite present itself but was enabled nonetheless. Not when a trickle of ease, an awareness of the warmth beneath him and behind him, seemed to tiptoe through him by such a simple act in a way entirely too apparent to him.

There was definitely something weird about him. Definitely.

"That's not what I meant," Malfoy said, the added _and you know it_ heard but not spoken.

Half-glancing over his shoulder, swallowing down a flicker of embarrassment and ignoring the similar flicker of warmth that touched his cheeks, Harry shrugged. "Does it bother you? I'll move if it does, but I figured…"

Malfoy didn't say anything. He took a breath, Harry knew, he felt it, but he didn't speak. Harry waited a beat, then two, and finally turned back to studying the sample.

_I'm an idiot, _he thought, even as he attempted to distract himself by properly working. _What the hell am I doing? Why do I…?_ He gave a mental shake of his head, settled himself a little more comfortably in his seat that Malfoy hadn't yet tossed him off, and readjusted his hold on the microscope. Only to freeze at the unexpected warmth of Malfoy's chest as it brushed against his back, the hyperawareness of his arm reaching around Harry with probe extended to prod at the smear.

"I think it's probably looking like an acid-based substance, though I'd have to check with an indicator first. You can see around the edges. See?"

"Mm," Harry hummed, resisting the urge to lean back a little. Hermione's theory was growing more likely by the second. Maybe he was just critically touch-starved.

"What did you turn up in the textbook?"

Harry shifted slightly again, brushing against Malfoy once more and just as resolutely ignoring the little flicker of warmth that settled in his belly this time. "You're actually asking me that?"

"What? Asking you -?"

"Nothing." From his periphery, Harry could make out Malfoy's face, his head tipped forward slightly to peer over Harry's shoulder. "I just expected you to give me a redundant job or something and do all the work yourself."

Malfoy didn't turn his head, but Harry could feel him glance at him sidelong. "You were going to mooch off me?"

"No. I just expected you to think I would."

"Are you going to?"

"I just said I'm not."

Malfoy grunted. "Then don't expect me to expect it. Idiot."

Turning his head slowly, Harry just as slowly raised his eyebrows. "Excuse the fuck me?"

Malfoy rolled his eyes. The gesture was so unexpected, so unseen of him that year until that moment, that Harry almost started. "Whatever. Look, are we going to actually do some work, or not?"

Harry stared at him a moment longer. Malfoy stared right back, probe raised expectantly. A moment of stasis passed, the mutters of the rest of the class the only interruption. Then Harry snorted, shook his head, and turned back to the microscope. "Whatever. Prat."

"You're the prat. Make sure you pull your weight, you tosser."

"I was intending to." Harry shuffled back a little in Malfoy's lap. "Git."

"Asshole."

"Wanker."

"Dumbass."

Harry snorted again. "Yeah, well, you're the one who has to work with me, so joke's on you."

Malfoy didn't reply to that, so Harry took it as a win. He didn't speak after that either, simply waiting as Harry leaned back over the microscope lens. He didn't dump Harry onto the floor, however; if anything, his shuffling shift on the stool made Harry's seat a little more comfortable.

What was even more comfortable was when Malfoy hooked his arms around him to better reach the microscope. He began poking and prodding, using the probe and miniature spatula to gesticulate, as he muttered speculations in Harry's ear, and Harry tried to listen. He did. It was even a little bit interesting, he supposed. It was just…

Too comfortable. Warm, and close, and comfortable. Yes, Harry thought there was something definitely strange about him. Blessedly enough, Malfoy didn't seem to hate him enough anymore to do anything about it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

"Do you think," Harry said slowly, chewing over each word before voicing it, "that dying can change things about you?"

Silence met his words. A long, loaded silence in which Harry could feel his friends staring at him. He didn't look their way. He didn't think he could. Instead, practically lying across the desk and his textbooks, elbows propped wide and face resting in one hand, Harry stared out the window. It was raining, he noticed deliberately so that he didn't have to notice anything else. Raining heavily enough that droplets flecked the window with the force of hailstones. It created a modest white noise that overlaid Harry's question thickly enough that it could have passed unnoticed by anyone standing a couple of steps away.

Hermione and Ron weren't a couple of steps away. Despite their lack of immediate reply, Harry knew they'd heard him clearly.

"Harry," Hermione eventually began, her voice low.

"Just hypothetically," Harry said. He thought he did a pretty good job of keeping his tone casual, though doubted either of his friends believed it. "In a hypothetical situation or something."

"What're you trying to say, mate?" Ron asked, his own voice hushed. More hushed than it needed to be with that rain, certainly.

Harry shrugged. He spun his quill in his fingers, absently tapping the dry nib upon his barely-touched essay. He couldn't even remember what he'd been writing about. "It's just a question," he murmured.

"Hypothetically, then," Hermione said. "If, ah, someone hypothetically died and – and came back. You think something about them might have changed?"

"I think it's possible," Harry said, as though they all weren't stalwartly pretending to be speaking of anyone but him. He didn't want to have this discussion, or any discussion of a similar grain, but he needed to. He needed to know if those little things, those little bits and pieces that he'd never noticed before, that might not have been there before, arose because Voldemort had killed him or whether they'd always been there. Was it possible to have parts about himself that he hadn't realised? More than that, could there have been parts that were hidden, tucked away without his knowledge, because of – what? Because of priorities?

It seemed almost silly when he thought about it like that. How could anything, no matter how big, manage to hide parts of his character, traits and habits, likes and dislikes, without his awareness? And yet Harry half hoped it had been an oversight, that he simply hadn't noticed. To think that death had somehow changed him was a scarier thought than he wanted to admit. But then…

There were the moments when he seemed to lose track of time. Countless nights when he didn't sleep quite as well as he used to – or had he ever really slept well? Harry didn't know. Maybe he'd just never noticed he hadn't.

Losing himself in thought, then not even in thought but mindlessness, before jerking back into awareness as though abruptly woken from sleep. Caught in the midst of memories that, when shaken from them, he couldn't even recall the nature of except that they felt 'bad' and 'sad' and 'cold'. That when he was shaken from them, he often found himself flinching, tensing, drawing away from barely touching hands and curious gazes before he could help himself.

It could be from the war. Not from dying but from the war itself. Harry, just like every other student at Hogwarts – every other professor and Order member too, most likely – had been told what to expect. He'd spoken to the Ministry-appointed Mind-Healers, sat through rigorous physical assessment, listened to the lecture, and he'd absorbed enough of what was told to him to understand at least vaguely.

War changed people. That was what everyone said. Whether as grief and pain, memory and loss, residual terror that clung like a second skin for years and years later, it could linger. That was what they all said. But what if someone had died? Did that make a difference? Did it make it… more?

Harry thought it might be a little bit to do with the war. The little things, the memories and the sleep and that he would lose track of time. He was pretty sure that just about everyone in Hogwarts' eighth year, and likely in the years below too, felt the same. But he didn't think the other parts were to do with it. Not at all.

Harry found that he became cold often. He'd asked Ginny if his skin felt chilled and she'd shaken her head with a bemused frown, but he still felt it. Not even cocooning himself tightly in a blanket helped to chase it away.

Which Harry realised he liked. He hadn't ever considered it before, but when the cold came, or a memory struck, or sleep eluded him to leave him staring at the far wall of the boy's dormitory through blurry eyes and thick shadows, the tight confines of the simple blanket helped. Harry had never realised that before, had never felt the need to notice.

He didn't like to close his curtains though. He didn't like to keep the door closed. He liked the windows open, felt it made it just a little easier to breathe with a cool breeze, and found himself wandering outside every so often simply because it felt nice to be out. Why had he never noticed how it felt? Why hadn't he realised that, when the weight of a building no longer hung over him, it was as though a similar weight was lifted from his shoulders?

Sweet food was delicious, but Harry realised for the first time at the welcome feast that he couldn't eat too much of it because after a few mouthfuls it just didn't taste right. The darkness at night was comforting when it wasn't complete but smothering without the outline of light from an unseen source. The presence of others, hearing their voices breathing, made it a little easier to breathe himself, and the stagnation of utter silence was horribly deafening.

Harry was good at Defence magic but he discovered that he didn't like to do it so much anymore.

He loved quidditch but found the rush of adrenaline from flying to be even more captivating than he'd ever found the game to be.

He didn't really like reading but the library was unexpectedly soothing, the murmur of voices hidden behind shelves and Madam Pince's shuffling footsteps unseen but appreciated company.

Harry didn't like to be stared at but he found staring back at others almost compulsive.

And touching. Touching felt good. Not the kind of touching that he hadn't really done with Cho, or had only done a little more with Ginny, but a different kind. A hand resting against his own. The warmth of a body alongside him. When Ron slung an arm around his shoulder, or Hermione leaned against him to peer at his work, or the few times he'd sat next to Ginny at dinnertime and she nudged him fondly with an elbow.

Or when he sat with Malfoy.

How had Harry never noticed those little things? Had they always been there, or had they only just appeared? Was it a good thing or a bad thing that he found he liked company, need it, if it was the right kind and in the right way? That he felt the strange coldness retreat just a little when smothered in the confines of a blanket or warmed by the proximity of a friend?

Harry didn't know, and it bothered him. Mostly, it bothered him because he didn't know where it had all come from. It bothered him because those things seemed to unfold to chase their needs without regard for how he consciously felt about them.

Which was how he found himself planting himself on Malfoy's lap in the middle of Potions only a week ago, entirely without provocation or logical reason.

Harry frowned up at the multi-coloured curtains, still bright but magically faded to a slightly gentler hue than they'd been. He didn't know why he'd done that in Potions. He didn't know why Malfoy had let him either, but mostly he was concerned about what had made him do it at all. And why Malfoy of all people? He'd never done such a thing with his friends. He couldn't imagine sitting on Ron's knee, shuddered to think at what Ron would think and how he would react, and Hermione would more than likely enact her usual rigid awkwardness whenever they made any kind of intimate contact. She still never felt particularly comfortable when they hugged, even if Harry felt the urge to accept one from her more and more often in the past year. It was as though her arms simply didn't bend that way.

He'd never done that with Ginny, either. It would have felt strange, and though Ginny wasn't a long sight smaller than himself, thinking of it… No, it didn't seem right. He was fairly sure he could crush her. Malfoy wasn't really much bigger than him or anything; taller, yes, which had been a source of disgruntlement for Harry when he'd realised it for the first time, but not really all that much bigger. So why…?

"Are you alright, Harry?"

Shaken from his thoughts, Harry glanced back towards Hermione. Her brow was furrowed, her stare intent and unblinking, and at her side Ron wore an almost identical expression. They'd both abandoned their own homework, which was saying something given that Hermione had spent most of the evening coaxing Ron into putting more effort into his studies. She'd been doing a lot of coaxing that year.

Harry opened his mouth to reply, considered, then shook his head. "It's nothing," he said. "Probably just being stupid."

"It's not stupid if it's worrying you," Hermione said.

Ron nodded. "Talk to us, okay? If you're bothered about something –"

"It's fine," Harry interrupted, then smiled as Ron's frown deepened. "Seriously, it was just a thought. Too long studying so my mind was drifting or something, you know?"

Hermione didn't look deterred, but Ron's face cleared a little. A small smile touched his lips. "Yeah, I hear you. How much more of this essay do I have?" He flipped through the parchment sheets before him, wincing at the minimal stack. "Dammit, I could have sworn I'd written more than this."

"Sixty inches isn't too bad for a transfiguration essay, really," Hermione said, frowning at Harry for a moment longer before turning to Ron. "Especially not for _Erratica-Morphis_ Incidents."

"Maybe not for you," Ron said, though his smile remained. "For the rest of us academic imbeciles, it's harder."

"You're not an imbecile, Ron."

"Aren't you sweet, lying and all that."

"It's not a lie, and stop joking about that. I'm serious."

"Still…"

Harry almost immediately tuned them out. They'd fallen into such exchanges more and more often of late, and while Harry didn't begrudge them their odd form of flirting, he wasn't particularly inclined to listen to it.

Instead, turning his vague gaze out to the Dragon's Nest common room instead, he folded his arms and laid his cheek down on top of them. The room had lost most of its inhabitants to their dormitories, leaving the space feeling larger than usual. It wasn't a big tower to begin with, so the feeling was appreciated.

There was a trio of ex-Ravenclaws at the desks three down from Harry and his friends, heads bowed but with only one of them seemingly still working. The other two looked on the verge of sleep. Alongside the bookshelves, Hannah was tucked into the cushioned couch with her knees drawn up before her and a book propped against her thighs. She looked ready to fall to sleep, too. As he watched, Neville, sitting in the couch beside her, leaned over the arm of his own chair and murmured something that had them both smiling sleepily. Other than that, there was only…

"What's that?" Ron asked.

Harry didn't realise he'd made a sound until Ron turned towards him, raising an eyebrow. Hermione turned in synchrony, and though the concern she'd worn earlier had been momentarily quelled, she affixed her gave to Harry with just as much attentiveness as before.

His friends really were too good to him, Harry couldn't help but think. Even caught up in one another as they were, they still took the time to consider him.

"Nothing much," Harry said. "It's just…"

He trailed off, eyes flicking to where they'd settled before, and Ron and Hermione both twisted in their seats to follow the line of his gaze. Hermione pursed her lips and Ron frowned, hunching his shoulders slightly as he turned back to Harry.

"Sorry about that again, Harry," he said, lowering his voice again even though, if anything, the intensity of the rain had increased. "It would have been nice if you'd had a proper partner for the Potions project."

Harry gave a shrug, a little awkwardly given that he couldn't quite find the inclination to raise his head from his arms. "I don't mind. Actually – yeah, no, I don't mind." At Hermione's silent question, the curious tilt of her head, he shrugged again. "It's just – what do you guys think of Malfoy?"

A momentary lull met his words, and once more Harry's friends glanced back across the room. Seated before the fireplace, a parchment and quill in hand, Malfoy was alone within the half-circle of couches. With head bowed, wearing the blank expression that he seemed to always bear these days, and utterly isolated, he didn't look much like the prat of a rival he'd once been to Harry.

Not much like the Malfoy that Harry had met in Potions the previous week either, or in those since. Malfoy was strange when they were studying in one another's company; Harry didn't think there were the thick, thrumming undertones of hatred that there had once been, but at the same time, the quiet, reserved, almost sadly aloof Malfoy that seemed to have taken his place every other moment of the day took a momentary break, too. Just as strangely, Harry found it somehow relieving; if nothing else, that Malfoy still found himself capable of sharp retorts to Harry, if only to Harry, was reassurance that not everything in his world had changed.

"I think," Hermione began slowly.

"He's a git," Ron said, overriding her. He turned around firmly in his seat, elbows dropping onto the table with a heavy thud. "He always will be."

"Ron," Hermione said.

"What?" Ron glanced towards her, then to Harry, eyebrows flattened into a straight line. "I know he was pardoned and everything, but you can't tell me he's a good person. He still did bad things."

"Ron," Hermione said again, a sigh in her words.

"He's always been an utter ass to us, all of us, and – come on, you saw him at the Battle, right?" Ron glanced between Harry and Hermione, back and forth. "Even after Harry saved him he tried to make nice with the Death Eaters."

"He was just trying to save himself," Hermione said. "A lot of people did things they regret in that battle. Things they're not proud of. Thing to just survive."

Harry couldn't agree more. At the time, anything had felt redeemable. In the heat of the moment, the urgency of casting a curse to protect someone else had been a necessity without question. But in hindsight, things looked a little different. Sometimes, Harry could remember just what curses he'd thrown and he felt nauseated at the picture that painted itself in his mind. Even Death Eaters, even murderers and kidnappers, followers of Voldemort – even if they were bad people, to leave someone writhing in pain, or sobbing beneath the affliction of a hex, didn't feel right.

Did that make him different from people like Malfoy? Malfoy had just been trying to protect his parents, right? Himself too, which was an order of priorities that Harry liked to think he himself had the right way around, but it wasn't… it wasn't as though…

"You can't really blame him, I suppose," Harry found himself saying, staring at Malfoy's profile and only half aware of Ron's attention snapping towards him.

"But –"

"Harry's right," Hermione said, interrupting Ron this time with a slight rise of her voice. "That's not fair, Ron. It's not fair to have double standards like that."

"But Malfoy has always been a git," Ron said, catching himself only on his last word and lowering his voice with a hasty glance over his shoulder. "Come on, Hermione, he's been a right ass to you especially, what with everything that he calls you. And to you too, Harry. How can you even say that?"

Harry only shrugged again, but Hermione lowered her quill onto her own stack of parchments and folded her arms across her chest. "I'd like to think I'm a better person than that," she said with such quiet intensity that Harry couldn't help but turn his gaze towards her instead. "I don't want to hold onto this hatred, Ron. It's too exhausting, and it's not worthy of us. If Malf – no. If _Draco_ is going to show he can change and at least pretend to be a better person, then I think I can be good enough to accept his attempts."

Harry was surprised. Quietly surprised, and especially by the firmness of Hermione's words. Clearly not as much as Ron was, however. "You're kidding." His eyes slowly widened as Hermione only frowned at him. "You're kidding, right? You're not? You're not. You're –"

Glancing towards Harry, back to Hermione, then to Malfoy again, Ron uttered a noise that wasn't a laugh, wasn't a scoff, but something in between. He slumped back in his chair, shaking his head. Harry doubted he even realised he uttered the choked "impossible" that was barely audible even between just the three of them.

"Is it, though?" Harry wondered aloud, and Ron's glance towards him, wide-eyed but also a little considering, and Hermione's small smile, was nothing if not validating. Was it so hard? Was it so… impossible?

They didn't speak much beyond that. Harry couldn't bring himself to study, couldn't find the urge to even with his newfound decision of that year to properly commit himself. Hermione scratched away at her parchment and Ron muttered under his breath as he read – or pretended to read – from his textbook, but Harry remained as he had been. Slumped forwards on top of the desk, cheek pressed into his forearms, he stared vaguely out across the room and thought.

Impossible. Was it really, though?

Neville and Hannah retreated first at the same time. The three ex-Ravenclaws next, Terry leading the way and looking more like a walking zombie from one of Dudley's old cartoons than an able-bodied student. When the bell chimed for midnight, eerily in time with Hermione reaching the end of her length of parchment, she sighed in a way that Harry recognised as meaning she'd had enough for the night.

"Off to bed?" Ron asked, as aware of Hermione's quirks as Harry.

"I think so," she said. "It's not healthy to skimp on sleep."

"Right. Leaves you too out of it for school the next day, yeah?"

Hermione's smiled warmly. Why such a statement seemed to satisfy her so much, Harry didn't know, except that it came from Ron and she seemed to be nothing short of smitten whenever he demonstrated any glimpse of his own commitment to schooling. Ron, Harry thought, had realised as well; he was certainly dropping such comments more frequently of late.

They'd packed away the majority of their books and papers before either realised Harry hadn't made a move to join them. Hermione paused, turning towards him with that flicker of concern she'd worn before. Ron, halting alongside her, glanced his way.

"You alright, Harry?" he asked

Harry hummed neutrally.

"You gonna come with?"

Harry hummed again. "In a little bit. I'll see you up there."

"Don't stay up too late," Hermione said, which Harry thought was rather restrained of her. She could rarely find it in herself to hold her tongue at a vague precaution rather than an order or demand – although, in the last few months, she'd been ordering and demanding far less than she once had. Maybe she'd changed in unexpected ways too?

Harry nodded, smiling up at her as she passed behind him and patted briefly, awkwardly, on his shoulder. "I won't," he assured her, and didn't watch them leave. He was only detachedly aware of them making their way up the stairs at all, for his attention was solely reserved for Malfoy.

Or Draco. Hermione had called him Draco, and really, why shouldn't Harry? They weren't enemies anymore, were they? Not even really rivals. If anything, Harry didn't quite know why they'd begun to refer to one another by their surnames in the first place; he'd never done so to anyone before coming to Hogwarts and, when he thought about it, suspected it was more in mimicry of Malfoy – Draco – reverting to such formality.

But Draco. Harry watched Draco, and he didn't hate him, and didn't resent him as he stared at him. He just watched.

Draco had put away whatever he'd been writing. In the quietude, the otherwise emptiness of the Dragon's Nest common room, the only disturbance was the crackle and splutter of the fire as it chewed through the burnt husk of a log. Malfoy – _Draco_ watched it with what appeared to be avid attentiveness, not even blinking. His elbow was propped on the arm of the chair, chin cradled in his palm, and he watched.

Harry doubted he even saw the fire. He knew that feeling of staring and losing himself a little all too well.

That wasn't why he rose to his feet, though. It wasn't why he made his way across the room on silent feet that he hadn't even known didn't make a sound with a single step until recently. Not until Ron had made the passing comment, "I can ever hear you coming up behind me. Weird, huh?" Had Harry always walked quietly? When he was a kid, too? Or was that something else that came with the war, something that came with dying?

Harry didn't know, but he brushed the thought aside as he crossed the room to Malfoy's couch. To Draco's couch. How long would it take for it not to feel strange to even think of him like that? Harry didn't know, but he swiped that thought aside, too, regarding Draco as he stared with blank eyes and blank face at the flames.

Draco didn't seem to notice him as Harry stopped alongside his couch. Not immediately. It was only when Harry tipped his head slightly, watching him at an angle and noticing – had Draco always been so pale? Had his features always been so sharp, his face so long and thin? – that Draco seemed to shake himself from his thoughts enough to notice Harry at all. When he did, his eyes darted towards him and he twitched.

That was all. Just a twitch. No change in expression but the reflexive flinch of muscles.

"What?" Draco asked, blinking hooded eyes.

Harry gave a slow, hitching shrug that barely moved his shoulders. "Just thinking."

"Thinking."

Draco said it less like a question and more like a statement. Once, Harry thought he would have laced it with derision, with scepticism, and added a "you can actually think real thoughts, Potter?" But not anymore. That had changed too. So many changes.

When Harry thought, however, it wasn't about his own death. It wasn't about the things he'd noticed of himself and what niggled and gnawed like a starving dog with a decrepit bone – or at least not entirely. Staring down at Draco, Harry was brought back to their Potions class, their casual exchange, the digs that were barbed but weren't really cruel. That Harry had sat on Draco's knees as he had before, but deliberately. He'd thought about that a whole lot, actually.

Why had Draco let him do that? Why didn't he shove him off, or kick up a fuss? Why didn't he bluster, or scowl, or snap, or at least question just what the hell Harry was doing and demand an answer? Harry didn't think he could properly answer him for he didn't rightly know himself, but it would be reasonable of Draco to pose the question.

Why? Why from both sides of their table?

Absently perching on the arm of Draco chair, alongside but not quite touching where Draco had propped his arm, Harry folded his arms across his chest. He turned towards the fire just as Draco had stared before, less in fascination and more to avoid Draco's hooded stare and blank expression that he couldn't read for the life of him.

"About the other day," Harry finally said. "In Potions."

A pause met his words. Not loaded, or guarded, or even particularly curious, though nearly a whole minute later Draco asked, "What about it?"

Harry swallowed. A flicker of awkwardness coiled in his gut, but it wasn't debilitating. Not enough to stave off his question, the question that he wanted to ask as much as he wanted to know the answers to every other one that posed itself to him of late. "When I… when we… were looking into the microscope and everything," Harry tightened his folded arms briefly, then fought to loosen their tension, "You didn't have to, you know."

Draco didn't pause for quite so long this time. "What do you mean?"

"With the –" Harry tripped over his words and, grumbling under his breath. He raised a hand to sweep through his hair, scuffing the back of his head. "How I, you know. Sat with you."

"With me?"

"On you." The flicker rekindled in Harry's gut, stronger this time, with a mirror rising in his cheeks that coaxed a flush of warmth to the surface. "When I sat. On you." Another swallow. "Sorry."

Draco shifted slightly in his seat, but when Harry glanced towards him, his face was as blank as he'd held it before. "You're apologising."

Another statement, not a question. "Yeah."

"Why?"

"Just –" Harry raked his fingers through his hair again. "Because. If it made you uncomfortable or anything. You didn't have to, you know. I get that it's – it's kind of weird, and I don't know why I did it, but it just feels – I dunno. Kind of weirdly comfortable."

Harry eyed Draco sidelong, but no reply was forthcoming. Not for a long beat and several of Draco's slow, hooded blinks. Harry shifted on his perch, aware but strangely enough not minding all too much that he was so close to Draco – to his old rival Malfoy – that he could all but feel his body warmth in the already warm common room. Why it felt somehow less awkward with Draco than his friends, less of a problem, less of a taboo to touch and be close, Harry didn't know.

But it did. And, so far, Draco hadn't seemed to have much of a problem with it all.

"It's just that," Harry began again, gaze lowering to his lap as he refolded his arms once more, "if what I did annoyed you – if you wanted me to bugger off, then say so. Alright? If it pisses you off, just say something."

Another long pause. Another moment of crackling quietude. Harry didn't glance towards Draco, staring dutifully downward and waiting. Just waiting. And shifting after a moment, because he'd never been much good at patiently waiting. Another shift in his makeshift seat, however, and he became aware of the instant that Draco's arm brushed across his back.

A tickle of warmth. The brush of contact, reminiscent of when Hermione attempted her awkward affection, or Ron clapped him on the shoulder, but not quite. Not the same, because Harry froze but didn't feel the instant, flinching instinct to retreat. To pull away, because it was probably an accident, that contact, and it hadn't been meant to happen. And if it hadn't been intentional, then that meant that it was unwanted. And if it was unwanted, then it was unsavoury, and whoever touched, however accidentally, might be angered, or upset, or –

Harry blinked. Or worse. The string of thoughts, continuing without him, rung loud and clear, and he hadn't ever heard them before. Not in such fluency and lucidity. Yet, despite that, it felt familiar.

When had _that_ happened? When had Harry realised – decided – that touching was a taboo? He couldn't recall, couldn't think of it ever really being a problem, but when he really thought about it…

Touching wasn't a thing. Not quite with Hermione, or with Ron. Barely with Ginny when they'd been together, and not even a handhold with Cho. Before that, with friends, with family, with –

With no one. When had nothing become a thing? When had 'nothing' and 'not allowed' become realised? And, just as importantly, when and why had it become alright if it was exempt with Draco Malfoy but no one else?

Harry didn't know, and he was momentarily stupefied with the realisation that hit him like so many others had of late. It was only when Draco retracted his arm, the brush of warmth against his back retreating, that Harry started back into proper awareness and glanced behind him.

Only when Draco withdrew his arm.

Only when he hooked it around Harry's waist instead.

Only when a forceful but not demanding or painful tug tipped him from his seat and promptly into Draco's lap.

Harry froze once more. He almost didn't dare to lift his gaze towards Malfoy and could only manage as much as flicking his eyes up towards him. Any thought of understanding and comprehending his mixed feelings dissolved beneath the weight of a greater concern. "What… are you doing?"

Draco regarded him, and his eyes were still incessantly hooded, his face persistently blank. Except that his expression was just a little too still, his cool detachedness broken by a slight hint of colour. It was the barest flush so minimal that it might have been overlooked entirely if Harry hadn't been sitting so close to him. Next to him. On him.

"If you don't like then, then say so," Draco said, throwing Harry's words back at him.

"I'm not – it's not that I –" Harry cut himself off, pursed his lips, and frowned. He drew his gaze sidelong, aware but not quite able to stop himself from easing from his rigidity into the comfort Draco's lap. "Last I checked, we didn't like each other. Do we?"

"It's not like I hate you," Draco said. "Mostly."

"You don't?"

"I – do you?"

Harry eyed him sidelong. "Well, No. Mostly. Just – it's not like I dislike you quite as much anymore."

Draco's expression didn't shift, but it seemed to defrost slightly. "Right. Not as much."

"Kind of hard to, right? After… everything."

"Yeah. Everything."

"I mean, you're still a prat –"

"Shove off, git."

"- but still." Harry folded his arms back across his chest, momentarily tensing at Draco's words with the expectation of being flipped onto the floor. When Draco didn't move, he peered up at him warily. "It's weirdly comfortable. To me."

Draco swallowed. Harry wouldn't have noticed it that either if he hadn't been sitting so close. Next to. On. "Yeah."

"I honestly didn't mean to –"

"I know. At least, not the first time."

"You mean when I -?"

"When you were drunk off your face."

_Oh, _Harry thought blankly. _So he does remember._ Hunching his shoulders slightly, arms more wrapped around himself than objectionably folded, he shrugged tightly. "Yeah, well, you didn't complain or anything, so I just figured… whatever. Right?"

"Yeah," Draco said. "Whatever."

"You're cool with it?"

Draco didn't reply. Not until Harry shot him a glance. Then he rolled his eyes, his old snottiness making an appearance once more as Harry hadn't caught a glimpse of since Potions the week before. "I said I was," he grumbled, bottom lip jutting slightly in a little pout.

Just like that, Harry felt the tension seep from his shoulders. He released a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. "Cool," he said. "That's great." Then, leaning against Draco with a casualness he didn't wholly feel, "if it's okay with you, then, I'm just going to keep using you as a seat, okay?"

Draco scoffed. Harry felt it from his chest, resounding through his own shoulder, and weirdly, strangely, utterly incomprehensibly, it felt comfortable too. The warmth, the closeness, the feeling of a body moving just against him, a heartbeat felt loudly enough it was almost heard.

"Yeah, whatever," Draco said, draping an arm around Harry with real casualness that Harry doubted he could ever manage to emulate. "Just maybe not when people are watching."

"Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

"People talk."

"Yeah."

"And hate me."

"But not as much as they used to."

Draco scoffed again, but the way he flicked Harry's elbow briefly didn't seem like a reprimand. Rather, the way his arm rested – it felt kind of nice, too. Like a hug, almost, but not quite. Not the same as those he'd had before, lingering longer and prickling Harry's skin beneath his shirt where he rested against Draco.

Surprisingly, and a little wonderfully, Harry didn't feel the need to haze himself with accusations and questions of why. Somehow, it was an easier anomaly to accept when someone else was acting just as weird. Harry might not quite understand why Draco allowed it, but he'd take it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

"Hey, Harry!"

Pausing in step, Harry glanced over his shoulder down the length of the corridor. Speckled with students heading in the direction of the Great Hall, all dressed down in casual weekend wear, it took him a moment to spot Ginny weaving towards him.

She picked up her pace to a jog as she approached him, a smile drawing onto her face. Falling into step alongside him, she butted her shoulder briefly against Harry's as they continued down the hallway.

"You've just had lunch?" she asked.

Harry nodded.

"Did you have the steak and kidney pie?" At Harry's head shake, she breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief. "Lucky dodge. It tasted like crap."

When Harry only smiled, she fell silent herself and continued to only stare at him. Harry didn't mind noticing only from his periphery. Some days it felt nicer just to be quiet. Some days, more frequently of late but as something that Harry realised he'd probably partaken of for years, the urge to speak just abandoned him. The instinct to remain silent rather than risk putting his foot in his mouth was easier to abide than to fight. On the flip side, Harry knew that other days he couldn't seem to help but practically swallow his whole foot, but days like today…

"You're being awfully quiet."

Harry spared Ginny a sidelong glance. He shrugged a shoulder. "Just tired, I guess."

"Senior year's catching up with you?"

"Yeah. Something like that."

"Is that why you decided not to go to Hogsmeade today?"

Harry opened his mouth to reply but paused. Was that why? No, not really. It had mostly been because to accompany Ron and Hermione on what had clearly been Ron's awkward attempt at asking Hermione on a date was nothing short of ludicrously obtuse of him. It didn't matter that Ron's attempt dissolved into an argument of sorts, as it so often did between the two of them. Harry had decided months ago that arguing was their warped version of flirting. Every act of flirtation had to be accompanied by such an exchange or else it would have been far too discomforting; Ron would have blushed beetroot red, and Hermione would have stuttered and spoken too much, and it would fall to Harry to save the moment and change the subject.

It was strange, but somehow, in a short time, Harry had become the bridge between his friends' floundering. He wasn't sure if he particularly enjoyed his newfound duty. It was far easier to let them flail and either sink or swim. Besides, he had other places he could be. Other places he wanted to be.

"I was thinking of going to the library," Harry said. "I've got to do some reading for Transfiguration."

"Ew, study." Ginny pulled a face but was grinning again a split second later. "Theory of Fundamental Transitions, right? I've still got to read that chapter."

"Yeah. It's a struggle."

"Tell me about it."

They continued to walk for a time in silence, a comfortable silence that held none of the tension that Harry knew others experienced with their exes. He and Ginny had never had that. They'd never had a break up talk, never discussed how to 'stay friends' when Harry still kept up with Ron and Ginny happened to persist in being his sister, and they'd never danced around the subject of spending time with one another in the same friendship group. It just sort of… happened.

And it was comfortable, for the most part. Except that, while Harry might have discovered and was growing to accept that sometimes he had quiet days, Ginny had never been a quiet person.

"Me and Luna are going to head down to the quidditch pitch this afternoon," Ginny said as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Detours often swept up and down stairwells, and Harry's feet directed him more than his head. "You're free to come too if you'd like."

"Luna's playing quidditch?" Harry asked.

Ginny laughed. "'Playing' in the loosest sense of the term. She's actually pretty good on a broom but lacks a competitive streak so much that I don't think winning is even a word in her vocabulary."

Harry smiled. "True. I'll think about it. Maybe later."

"Yeah, sure." Ginny slowed, leading them to a pause at a junction in the corridor. The echo of students in the Great Hall, the clatter of lunch and the chuckle of voices, was only a distant hum. "Are you all right, Harry? You seem a little down lately."

Harry blinked. Down? He didn't think so. What made him seem down? If anything, he felt a little unbalanced with his affliction of realisations that still dawned on him every other day, but he didn't think he was sad. "I'm fine," he said.

"Are you sure? 'Cause you can always talk to me about anything. You know that, right? Ron can be a bull-headed, insensitive idiot sometimes, and I know Hermione gets a bit weird talking about feelings on the best day."

Harry stared at her, at a momentary loss. Rocking between her feet, tweaking the end of her braid and regarding him with such open honesty that Harry couldn't begin to think she was teasing him, she was a wonder. Still, even when they'd broken up, he could appreciate that she was gorgeous, and genuine, and the kind of appealing that had as much to do with the personality she wore in every expression as her physical features. If Harry could do it again, they might very well have stayed together. He might have even wanted them to. But now –

Did Harry want that? He wasn't sure. He didn't really care at that moment either, because Ginny was presenting herself as the steadfast friend that she'd always been, a pillar of sincerity offering herself to Harry as a supportive crutch.

Smiling with as much warmth as he could manage, Harry nodded. "Thanks, Ginny. Everything fine, I swear, but thanks. I'll keep it in mind."

Ginny nodded slowly, then with more commitment. "Yeah. Yeah, you'd better." Then she leaned forwards and, before Harry could even think to step away from her, wrapped him in a tight embrace that all but crushed his spine into his stomach. Harry was rendered breathless, and not only because his lungs felt pinched to two sizes smaller than they should be.

Retreating just as quickly, Ginny took a step backwards. She beamed at Harry, raised a hand, and backed down the hallway. "Catch me later, yeah? The pitch. I'm counting on it."

"Yeah, yeah," Harry said, ignoring the slight hoarseness to his own voice.

"I mean it. If you're not playing quidditch this year – which is crazy enough as it is – you have to give me at least that."

She was turning on her heel and trotting away before Harry could reply. A vibrant, loud, and warm presence, Ginny was like her own personal sun that all but illuminated the corridor she descended. Harrys stared after her until she disappeared around the corner in the direction of the old Gryffindor Tower. He was still staring when the sound of her footsteps disappeared, and it took a physical shake of his head to pull himself out of his stupor.

That was happening a lot lately, too.

Turning back down the left-hand corridor, Harry continued to the library. Once, it would have been the last place he would have voluntarily sought, imposing the dusty aisles and dustier shelves upon himself only under Hermione's demands or when his grades were slipping enough that he felt obligated to properly study. In the past few weeks, however, Harry had visited the library more often then he could count. Sometimes it happened even several times a day.

_Things change, _Harry thought in a voice that didn't sound like his own, and he could only silently acknowledge the truth of it. A lot had changed that year, possibly more than Harry had ever experienced before, and not the least of which was his and Ginny's relationship. Yet it was that relationship, that friendship and all it entailed, that rode forefront in his mind as he slipped through the library's double doors. Most significantly, he considered Ginny's hug.

It had been warm. Sincere. Open, and honest, and as firm and steadfast as Ginny was herself. And yet it had been vastly different to every other embrace they'd ever shared, and Harry didn't think it was so much because they were no longer dating. Rather, the difference lay in that, far from sinking into it, Harry had felt the urge to draw away from Ginny. Because he'd realised that he'd wanted to draw away.

Where had that come from? And why? He didn't know, and it gnawed at him. Ginny was his friend. If she wanted to hug him then she bloody well could, and Harry would enjoy the support and affection the gesture offered. He _would. _So why did he feel such an urge to retreat?

_And why, _Harry thought as he passed into the hollow depths of the library that resounded with echoes of silence, _is it so different then when I'm with Draco?_

Harry's feet took him through the aisles, past study nooks and crannies and beyond the designated senior study area. He barely thought about where he walked anymore, and in short order found himself in a back corner, a darkened corner, with little more than a table, a handful of chairs, and a flameless lamp glowing warm, orange light throughout.

And Draco.

Draco – because it was Draco, even if Harry still occasionally needed to remind himself to consider him by his given name – sat in the same seat he always did. His head was bowed over a textbook, face and hair made paler in the relative darkness, and his quill scratched away even though he didn't look at his hand as he worked. He was, Harry had discovered in a very short time, a hard worker. Very hard. Maybe Harry had always known to a certain degree, but he'd acknowledged it and even grown to admire it a little in the past few weeks they'd been studying.

Studying together and yet alone, that was, because to consider additional company was off the table. Despite that he knew Ron still grappled with old grudges, and that Hermione pointedly allocated a number of hours each afternoon to their schoolwork, Harry found himself in Draco's company and pouring over textbooks more and more often.

"Where do you disappear off to every afternoon?" Ron had asked Harry only the day before. "I've been wondering for a while now, you know."

"I know you have," Harry had replied. "This is the third time you've asked me."

"And?"

"And what? Same as usual. I'm just studying, except that sometimes I feel like doing it by myself."

Ron had shaken his head, frowning with a tinge of horror colouring the edges of it. "Weird."

"What is?"

"That you'd actually want to study." He'd shaken his head again. "But then, I guess, I sort of am, too. Maybe Hermione finally managed to infect us with her study bug." He'd said it like a bad thing, but his crooked smile, surfacing even at his own mention of Hermione, appeared as it so often did of late.

Smitten. Yes, Harry decided Ron was a little bit smitten. It was at least half the reason Harry sought out solitary study.

Or semi-solitary. And the other half of the reason lay in Draco's company.

At Harry's arrival, Draco didn't look up from his notes. He didn't openly acknowledge Harry at all but to sit back a little in his seat, quill lowering, and focusing solely upon his textbook rather than notations. Harry dropped his bag onto the table, rifling within for a moment to extract his own textbooks that instantly resumed their usual weight when relieved of the confines of his bag and its Lightening Charm. He stacked them on the table, pulled out a handful of parchment pages, a quill and inkwell, and a paper bag.

"You haven't had lunch yet?" Harry asked, turning to Draco.

It took a moment, but Draco's eyes eventually flicked up to him. His usual expression – or at least the usual for the past few months that was so vastly different to the sneering, the lip-curling, the scowling – was as firmly affixed as ever. He blinked in blank reply.

"Didn't think so." Harry held out the bag to him as he approached the side of Draco's chair. "They didn't have any beef, but there's a few ham and cheese, a couple of salad, too."

Draco blinked up at him again, hand drifting from where it had been resting atop his textbook to the offering. "Egg?"

"No. 'Course not."

Draco nodded. Only then did he accept the paper bag and, settling back properly into his seat, gave indication enough for Harry that he was pausing in his study. Without a word about it from either of them, Harry seated himself in Draco's lap and, pulling his Transfiguration textbook from the table, leaned back against the arm of the chair with his leg hooked over the other side, and propped the book in his own lap.

No questions asked. No real acknowledgement. It just happened.

Why it was alright if Harry was touching Draco, sitting on him, leaning against him, and yet to receive a hug from Ginny or a touch from Ron, a pat from Hermione or the bump of a shoulder from any other one of his classmates left him distinctly uneasy, Harry didn't know. He wasn't sure he'd ever know. All he could think was that, while the brush of a hand felt wrong, too close, too compassionate and affectionate, and too loaded with the potential for instant recoil, when it came to Draco all of that didn't seem to matter.

There wasn't much affection between them. Not that Harry could see. He wasn't even sure any existed, or what it would look like if it was there. He and Draco didn't like one another after all – did they? It was a transaction of sorts, comfortable for Harry and tolerable for Draco, though why and how, Harry wasn't sure in any sense of the term. It just happened. It was easy, agreeable, and Harry didn't worry that in a split-second Draco might decide he'd had enough and end their agreement.

Maybe that was it? Draco could stop at anytime, but it wouldn't be that bad. It wouldn't end anything else. It wouldn't _change_ anything else.

Giving a mental shake of his head, Harry settled into reading through the thick pages of his textbook that were dry for more than just the white-washed parchment. His shoulder, propped against Draco's chest, felt the minute movements of him eating his lunch, but he barely registered it. Only a few days before, Harry had begun showing up to their un-agreed-upon meeting point and all but silently delivered a handful of whatever vaguely portable food was on offer from the meal before.

"What's this?" Draco had asked the first time.

"You missed dinner."

"So?"

"So, don't do that. You have to eat, dumbass."

The second time, Draco had frowned. "I don't need you to provide food for me."

"I know."

"Then why are you bringing me food?"

"Just because you don't need me to doesn't mean I have to stop. Shut up and eat your croissant."

"Why should I -?"

"At least for my sake, okay? If you end up getting all skinny and bony, it's not going to be exactly comfortable for me either, is it?"

The third time, Draco had still frowned, but it was for a different reason. "I don't like tomato."

Harry had stared at him. Then he'd glanced at the burger. "'Scuse fingers, then," he'd muttered, pulling the burger apart and peeling the sliver of tomato out. He'd dropped the slice into the bag he'd carried the burger in, a bag that had unexpectedly and inexplicably appeared before him at the dinner table that day, and closed the bun. The urge to grin was difficult to suppress when Harry had held the burger out to Draco, who'd worn an expression of horror not unlike that Ron had worn when Hermione had first called Draco by his name.

"If you have a problem with it, go down to the Great Hall and get your food for yourself," Harry had said, shaking the burger pointedly. "Don't make me dump this in your lap. I'm still going to sit there, but it would make it gross."

Draco didn't question it anymore. After barely a handful of weeks, he'd learnt to take what Harry gave him without comment. Or at least when he did say something, it was as trivial as asking if Harry had made the heinous mistake of thinking eggs belonged in a sandwich.

Harry barely considered Draco as he made his way through the food he'd brought him. The slight movement of his chest against Harry's shoulder, the incremental adjustments of his arms as he in turn adjusted the sandwich, the sound of him chewing that was so quiet and almost dainty that Harry hadn't actually realised for a time that he was properly eating – it had all become familiar in such a short time. Familiar, and…

Comfortable. Just like sitting in his lap, and just as inexplicably.

Instead, Harry focused on the pages of minute writing, the bleached parchment covered in spidery print that once would have turned Harry's ducking in the other direction but had now become a gruelling necessity that he committed himself to. Gruelling, but slightly less than it had been. Maybe Hermione had been right for all those years; the more he studied, the easier – slightly easier – it became.

_But I doubt structural transfiguration and foundational scaffolding will ever be actually interesting, _Harry thought as he escaped the other side of a page-length paragraph to flip to the next. _How can anyone possibly think this would be willingly read?_

"That's unnecessary."

The sound of Draco's voice was felt through Harry's shoulder, just as his eating had been, and it was so quiet and polite that he almost didn't register he'd been spoken to. Hauling himself from the page, Harry glanced up at him.

Draco wasn't watching him. Instead, he was regarding his hand, turning it over as though inspecting it for crumbs, then reaching around Harry in an awkward half-embrace to dust his fingers off on one another. Only then, after apparently satisfying his need for cleanliness, did he turn back to Harry. "What?"

What? What did he mean 'what'? Draco was the one who had spoken first, and with no explanation. "What does that mean?" Harry asked.

"What? That it's unnecessary?"

"Yeah. That."

Draco, arms dropping onto those of the chair with the kind of casual grace he seemed to innately possess, jerking his chin at the book resting in Harry's lap. "Chapter three, isn't it?" At Harry's nod, he shrugged. It nudged Harry slightly where he leant, but even that was commonplace and somehow comfortable these days. "I just skimmed it. You don't need to read anything but Cragstone's analogous description on page forty-nine. The rest is just unnecessarily flowery prose."

Harry stared. He blinked. He glanced down at his book, to the page number, the page itself, then back up to Draco. "Are you telling me what to study?"

"I'm telling you how to study, yes."

"What."

"How. Yes."

Harry blinked again. He opened his mouth before closing it again almost immediately. That was… unexpected. Also unexpected, like everything else about what was rapidly coming to feel like the Draco Situation. Harry flipped hesitantly to page fifty-nine and eyed the isolated paragraph quoted by Cragstone himself at the very centre. It was just as flowery as the rest of the chapter, but if Draco had meant what he said…

"Are you…?" Harry began, then paused. Draco was helping him study. Without being condescending, too. It was like he… like he was actually… Was he? Of all things, it seemed somehow the most unbelievable: that Draco would offer help, even minimally, without a hint of derision or sneering to accompany it.

Unbelievable. They'd been in almost silent company for the past two weeks, with the exception of mealtime deliveries and the muted suggestions of "sit here" and muttered "so this is really a thing now?" that arose every so often. Studying, but in parallel, not support. Even their research for the Potions report was sidelong rather than in tandem.

Except that, when Harry thought about, there had been that time. That one time, in Potions, when Draco had seemed open to showing him. To pointing and prodding, almost instructing, and just as devoid of condescension following their brief, bantering exchange as his simple words moments before had been. It was weird, but Harry hadn't really thought about it since it had happened. Not until now.

"Are you shitting with me?" Harry asked, eyeing Draco sidelong.

Reaching for his own textbook, that half-embrace that had become natural resurfacing, Draco paused. "What?"

"Are you telling me not to read the chapter because… because I should be?"

Draco frowned. "What?"

"Are you -?"

"Do you seriously think I'm trying to sabotage your studying?"

Harry pursed his lips. It sounded stupid when voiced aloud, but given their history and the precedent it set, it was plausible. Or would have been plausible, if it was the old Draco. Now, Harry wasn't so sure.

"I dunno," Harry muttered, tweaking the corner of the page. "I just wanted to check."

Draco stayed frozen. A moment of tension, uncomfortable to sit upon – or maybe the discomfort came from Harry; he couldn't be sure – seized him momentarily before Harry felt a slow, long inhalation vibrate through his shoulder.

"Potter," Draco began, then caught himself. "_Harry. _I'm not so much of a goddamned asshole as to tell you to study the wrong thing."

Discomforted though he was, Harry couldn't help but smile slightly at Draco's use of his name. Would that ever not feel weird? Or would it fade when his own lingering feelings of weirdness over using Draco's name did?

"Can you blame me for wondering?" he asked.

"I'm not going to – I'm not the kind of –"

"The kind of person to do that?" Harry deliberately raised his eyebrows. "Draco. Seriously. We hated one another until literally only a year ago."

Draco's mouth opened sharply before he snapped it shut again just as quickly. He appeared to chew over his words, jaw working before grinding out, "You never studied in the past. Not properly. Ever."

"Wow. Thanks for noticing."

"Be realistic. You were a terrible student."

Harry nodded, fighting another grin. "That's fair."

"Well, consider me at the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm a model student – "

"Model?"

"- and I will not, ever, interfere with another student's attempts to do the same."

Harry nearly snorted aloud, and only caught himself at the last moment. He frowned. Considered. Then nodded slowly. Draco had always been a prat. Always. He'd poked and pried at every opportunity – or at least Harry thought he had. When he really stretched him memory, however, a glimmer of truth attached itself to Draco's words.

How unexpected. Another un-expectation. How had Harry never noticed that, either? Or was it something that had changed in Draco, just as Harry was noticing his own changes? But no; scratching at that peeling skin of concealment, Harry peered underneath to find validity in Draco's claim.

How odd. How truly unexpected. To think that Draco Malfoy, lordly prat and all-round asshole that he'd been, had still maintained his obsession with academia and studiousness enough to restrain himself from really disrupting classwork. Before classes, after, and during breaks, maybe, but throughout?

Apparently not.

Harry slowly lowered his gaze down to his textbook once more. Considering only Cragstone's description, such a short segment when compared to the rest of the mind-numbing chapter, almost made him uneasy. Harry pursed his lips again. "You reckon I only have to read this bit?"

"I know it for sure," Draco said, still unmoving and frowning at Harry in blatant affront.

"So, you didn't read anything more than that?"

"I skimmed it. It was a load of crock."

Harry's lips twitched before he could help himself. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing. It's – no, it's nothing." Shifting slightly, leaning just a little more comfortably against Draco's chest, Harry resumed his reading. Draco took a little longer to return to his own, but when he did, it barely jostled Harry at all. Before Draco had opened his book, Harry was flicking to the next chapter. Skimming, if vaguely, but largely discarding the contents that Draco had brushed aside.

"Only the last seven pages of chapter four are worth paying any attention to," Draco said as he turned his attention to his Charms textbook. "Don't waste your time with the rest of it."

Harry nodded but didn't otherwise reply. As he flicked through chapter four, he noticed absently that it must have been the first time he'd actually smiled when he was studying.

* * *

A/N: PSA - Harry's mode of study is NOT conducive to learning! Study 101, don't just sit there reading a book 'cause it doesn't work! I know since I've bloody well tried.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

It was a bad night.

Harry had known it would be. Their Defence class, the last class of the day, had been a practical lesson. They were few and far between that year, and Harry might have even put it down to blessed luck if Ron hadn't spoken otherwise.

"Reckon they're doing us a favour," he'd said as Hermione spoke to herself of the wealth of essays they'd received that year already. It wasn't even Christmas yet and quill-hands were aching with the strain throughout the Dragon's Nest.

"What do you mean?" Harry had asked.

Ron had shrugged. It was a limp gesture, somehow melancholic, and almost seemed to sigh with feeling. "Just that, you know, I reckon they'd know not many of us would be all too keen to jump into duelling or defensive magic again. After everything."

It made sense. Harry supposed it really did. The talks the professors had offered, repeatedly and with more gentleness than he'd thought capable of some of them, to say nothing of the mandatory counselling sessions with the Ministry appointed Healer, and maybe he should have already made those same deductions.

The curriculum for Defence Against the Dark Arts – for all of their classes – might not have been changed, but the way they were taught certainly seemed that way. Harry hadn't even realised until that moment just how little he'd really used his wand that year.

Defence that day had been a trial. The spells weren't challenging. Their professor, an older woman by the name of Leachway that Harry hadn't ever met before attending her classes, had been far from demanding. And yet the first moment that Harry had acted upon her instructions had left him ringing as though struck like a gong.

_"A contained explosion. It takes skill to ensure it is not excessively destructive, and that the blast radius is minimised to the designated region."_

Not an easy task but simple enough in theory. What made it hard was the vibrancy of the light. The sound of the crash of contact. The splinter of wood as the dummy shattered, and the scatter of those splinters in a spraying array at the mannequin feet. Harry hadn't flinched, but he'd noticed those that did. He hadn't whimpered, but he heard more than a few voices that couldn't stop themselves. He hadn't even blinked, couldn't look away from the point of destruction, and barely noticed when his arm dropped limply to his side.

It had been a bad day. Not the first he'd practiced magic, nor the first that his own magic had dredged forth feelings he'd hoped had been vanquished, but that didn't make it any easier. Lying awake in his bed that night, staring at the canopy ceiling, he blinked slowly. The afterimage of shattered dummy remnants still swum before his gaze, a feeble mimic of the image of a real person, a real target, thinly hidden behind it.

Ron was snoring. Again. He didn't draw the curtains closed any more, didn't smother the sounds of life and company, and it wasn't only Harry and his friends that felt the need for awareness. Barely a handful of eighth years drew their curtains tight of a night, and even they struggled to manage it at times.

Ron slept. How he managed, Harry didn't know, but he'd always been a fast sleeper. They'd spoken quietly, shortly, before bed that evening, murmured words of little consequence – "Hermione wanted to head to Hogsmeade this weekend for Christmas shopping," and "Cool. Maybe I'll come this time" – but Ron's eyelids drooped and he didn't last long. Harry envied him that. When was the last time he'd fallen to sleep without a struggle? He didn't know. It felt like a long time.

Shivering slightly, Harry tucked his arms a little more tightly around himself. His chill had nothing to do with his blankets, magically warmed to stave off the iciness of winter's fingers that seeped through the dormitory's windows. Rather, it was the bed itself. It was his own arms, wrapped through one another, that seemed so insufficient. It was that the bed, once so gloriously his own, felt far too big for just himself.

That was another thing Harry understood of himself now as he never had before. The space. The size. Harry had never noticed how discomforting so much spare mattress was until that year. It could have been another product of the war, another affliction, but Harry didn't think so. When he scratched and picked at his memories, he didn't think there had ever been a time when the size of his Hogwarts bed hadn't been strange. Not even after years of occupation. It was simply that now, staring up at his canopy and shunted to one side of the bed as he'd always been, he felt it just a little more strongly than usual.

_It's too big_, he thought, hunching around the side of the mattress. _And too cold_. He tightened his arms around himself. Why did space and aloneness hit him so hard lately? It was so stupid of him.

Yet, regardless of that stupidity, it was an affliction that warded off sleep. Sighing, pushing himself upright, Harry scrubbed a hand over his face as the other reached for his nightstand. He barely thought about what he was doing as he shoved his glasses on with more force than necessary, swung his legs over the side of the mattress, and left the too big and too cold bed behind him. All but tiptoeing across the room despite the snores and mumbles that bespoke the prevalence of sleep, Harry made his way to the window and sunk to the floor.

Not since first year had he spent a sleepless night staring onto Hogwarts' grounds. That first year it had been a stare of wonder and euphoria, excitement and persisting disbelief that he was _here_, and _away_, and that the world of magic was a playground for him to explore with people who actually wanted his company. Many a sleepless night had been savoured with wide-eyed ecstasy, curled in upon himself and grinning like a fool through the darkened window.

Eight years later, and Harry curled upon himself once more. Arms hooked around his shins, chin resting atop his knees, he stared through the frost-coated window. He didn't smile this time, though. That in itself wasn't a surprise, wasn't a realisation the likes that Harry was struck by, for he knew why he didn't. Couldn't. Too much destruction seemed to weigh upon his hands and cling to the wand that sat abandoned on his nightstand. He would never have thought himself capable of wanting to have nothing at all to do with magic until then, but…

_If I could give up magic to take back all the wrongs I did, would I?_ _Would everyone else, too?_

A heavy sigh flushed from Harry's nose, almost as loud as Ron's snores, as Seamus' sleep-addled muttering across the room. The dormitory was stuffed full of boys, more than any other tower or House dormitory, but somehow it felt so distant and empty when each of its occupants were lost in sleep.

Or at least most of them were.

Harry didn't know how long he'd been sitting on the floor, arms locked and gaze vague, before the sounds of slumber were interrupted. Not fiercely, and barely noticeably, but in the quietude that thrummed like a sound of its own, the slight scuffle of feet was as loud as stomping steps.

Harry didn't glance over his shoulder at the noise. Not until it approached and stopped at his side. Even then, he only drew his gaze sidelong, a heavy glance weighted with weariness yet unable to sleep.

Draco stood at his side. With a silk nightgown drawn over his pyjamas, slippers on his feet, and his usually immaculate hair slightly ruffled, he was a picture asking to be teased and taunted that a year or two ago Harry would have been more than happy to oblige. _Such a pureblood_, arose in detached amusement even then. _Such an upperclass prat._ But it didn't feel like such a bad thing. There was no animosity anymore. If expensive clothes were something someone like Draco clung to, he could wear them. It didn't bother Harry, had nothing to do with him, and there wasn't really any reason to point it out.

For a moment, Draco didn't speak. Neither did Harry. Instead, he blinked down at him as Harry stared up in return, before stepping to the opposite side of the window and lowering himself to the ground.

"You'll freeze your arse off." He spoke quietly, yet in the hush of the dormitory it somehow felt loud.

Harry shrugged. It was cold, true, but a different kind to that he'd felt in his bed. This sort felt better. "Whatever."

"I pity Pomfrey if you go crying to her with frostbite."

"I wouldn't bother. She'd just tell me it was my own stupid fault before giving me a disgusting potion." Head tipping to rest his cheek atop his knees, Harry returned his gaze out the window, to the frost and darkness that spread like a film across the mass of shadows beyond,. "She's seen a whole lot worse."

"Is that the problem, then?"

Harry didn't really know what Draco was referring to. He didn't know, but he didn't ask, instead staring and blinking listlessly. Not quite asleep yet not quite awake. It was an intermediate suspension that sounded good in theory but was really a right pain in the arse, and not of the frostbite kind.

"It hit you, didn't it?"

Harry swallowed. Draco's words were low, barely a murmur, but loaded with exhausted resignation. Harry didn't really want to hear it. Not from Draco. Not when Draco usually wore so much cool aloofness, so much detachment, that he could have been the picture of boredom most of the time had he not been such a committed student.

That aloofness and detachment was stripped from his tone, and the raw scraping of pain beneath was revealed in stark relief. Harry had known it was there, as much because every single person at Hogwarts had it and felt it, but it was different to hear it. It was different to bear witness to when he was scrabbling to cover up his own damaged surfaces.

"In Defence," Draco added, as though it needed specifying.

Harry swallowed again.

With a sigh, Draco tipped his head back against the window frame behind him. Harry saw only from his periphery – the slight motion, the heavy blink of hooded eyes. "You know," Draco said slowly. It could have been almost conversational had it not been for that persisting rawness. "I didn't expect to feel this way. That it would hurt. Or that I wouldn't be able to move on. No one ever tells you about that part. Not my parents, even though they were in the first war. Not the Death Eaters – fuck, definitely not them. What we… what _I _did always just felt like a momentary thing. Like a short task to be completed and then left behind. I didn't think it would…"

Harry watched him sidelong. Why Draco was telling him this, he didn't know. Why he was speaking at all was just as much of a mystery; Draco didn't really speak to people. Not anyone but his friends. He didn't spend time with anyone else either that Harry knew of, with the exception of Harry himself when they spent hours in largely silent company every other day. But that company was loaded with study, or distracted by whatever meal Harry was all but forcing down Draco's throat for reasons he couldn't explain himself.

It wasn't like this. Nothing like this. Harry hadn't asked for it, wasn't even sure he wanted to hear it, but –

"I did bad things. Everyone did, I know, but especially me. Sometimes, when I hold my wand, I can hardly even move my hand to conjure something as simple as a _Lumos_. Sometimes I struggle to hold it at all, and I have to stop myself from throwing it away."

Harry slowly turned towards him. The dormitory was dark, but the pale glow of the frost, cast awash in almost luminescent white from the backdrop of moonlight, was illuminating enough to see by. Draco sat against the window, his head still rocked backwards, and his legs extended before him. With his ankles crossed, his hands held loosely in his lap, and eyes heavy lidded as they stared up at the dark ceiling, he was the picture of lazy relaxation. It was a sharp contrast to the words that spilled from his mouth, rough and coarse in more than just tone.

"I thought Hogwarts would be a way to get better," Draco murmured. "A way to show I could change – I would change – and that I'd already started to. I know I can't apologise for what I've done, and a part of me still thinks I shouldn't have to. I think… that what I was really trying to do was to survive, just like everyone else, so I don't know how…"

He trailed off, and it was in that moment, as Draco stared at the ceiling for a beat of silence before scoffing and closing his eyes, that Harry realised he wasn't really being spoken to at all. That Draco simply needed to get it out, and Harry happened to be the pair of ears to listen to his confession.

Why, he didn't know. It was still a mystery. Why not his friends either was also unclear, though Harry supposed that he might be able to relate to that a little himself. He told Ron and Hermione just about everything, but there were still parts that he couldn't speak of. There were still fears he couldn't voice, regrets that he knew he shouldn't admit to, not to them, and revelations about himself that barely made sense to him but seemed to be becoming more and more pronounced in his stagnant world of disrupted priorities.

Maybe it was a little like how Harry felt. How, with Draco, it felt alright to sit with him, to sit on him, to simply absorb the warmth and comfort of contact from someone he no longer hated but couldn't claim he really liked all that much either. Maybe, just like it was for Harry, Draco could speak because there was nothing much between them anymore.

And maybe Draco was onto something.

Turning away, resting his cheek back onto his knees, Harry gazed through the window once more. He opened and closed his mouth three times before he could utter a single word.

"I get it," he said. "Yeah, I get that. Magic seems harder than it was before."

"Tell me about it," Draco said, still little more than a murmur.

"I love magic. I love using it. It saved me more times that I can say –"

"And me."

"- and not just in the war. Before that, too, when I was a kid. Moving to school, away from my family, away from –"_ all of it, the hatred and everyone who hated me, _"- everything. It bloody well sucks that it almost doesn't feel right to use it anymore. Like I've used up my quota sometimes by using it in bad ways, or…"

Harry trailed off, barely conscious of the words that spilled from his mouth. Funny, how he hadn't quite realised what he felt until that moment. Funny, and yet so, so horrible. Sad, and unutterably unfair. Why was it that the one gift that had changed everything seemed to have been taken back years later? Recollected as though it had been borrowed rather than given? After everything, how was that fair?

"It really fucking sucks," Harry said, though the words were emitted in barely more than a croak. "Everything's changed, and it sucks. And it's not just with magic, and school, and everyone who…." He tightened his arms around his shins, tucking his legs a little closer to himself. "And me. Yeah, it changed me a whole lot, I think."

Draco shifted. Harry felt more than heard him. He didn't glance his way but instead loosened a hand from his crushing self-embrace and pressed his fingertips to the cold window. The contrast to his lukewarm skin was jarring, but only detachedly. "I think having something like that happen really opens up a lot of doors to learning more about yourself."

"Like what?" Draco asked. Asked Harry, that was. He definitely spoke to him this time.

Harry traced his fingers over the glass, leaving snail trail-like smears behind each movement. He didn't speak for a moment, but not because he couldn't. Not because he didn't want to. Somehow, it was easier to admit things to Draco, too. Easier to consider voicing his suspicions, to admit that he wasn't as strong as he'd hoped he was, nor as courageous, or as resilient. That he was pretty sure dying had hurt him in ways more than physical, and that it had shrivelled something more than the Horcrux within him. Was it possible to destroy one's fortitude with little more than a curse that had struck wrong anyway?

When words arose, though, it wasn't any of that. Not even a little. Rather, since it was Draco, what came forth was, "I don't like being alone."

It was the first time he'd said it, the first time he'd admitted it, and when he uttered those first words, the rest just spilled out. "At all. I don't like – I really don't like being by myself, but at the same time, I can't stand it when people are around and just talk, and talk, and talk all the bloody time. I –" His voice caught, thickened, and Harry only pushed past it with a convulsive swallow. "I think that's why I did it, you know. Do it. With you."

"Do it?" Draco asked.

"Sitting with you." Swallowing again, Harry squeezed his eyes briefly closed and drew a deep breath before turning back towards Draco. It was a surprise, though perhaps not as much as it had once been, that Draco stared back at him with quiet contemplation, not taunting or lashing out, not leaping upon Harry's vulnerability and grasping it with both hands to tear limb from limb. He just sat, as aloof as ever, his face upturned but dark eyes drawn towards Harry.

"I didn't mean to, you know," Harry said. "What happened and everything. It just – it just sort of –"

"Happened," Draco said.

"Yeah. And it felt really, really… nice."

"Comfortable."

Harry nodded. They'd said as much before, but it felt different this time. "Yeah. Because you're warm, and kind of soft."

"Soft?"

"Kind of." His voice was growing strangled now, and Harry couldn't quite work out the exact reason why. It wasn't quite awkwardness from but something like it. Not quite embarrassment either, though that felt a little closer to the mark. Tucking his face into the cradle of his arms, Harry spoke as much to the dark crevice in his lap as to Draco. "I really like it. It makes me feel calmer for some reason. Just touching, or whatever. I don't even care how that sounds, 'cause it's true."

Draco didn't reply. Not for a long, long time. Harry's not-awkwardness, his not-embarrassment, quivered in teetering confusion for a moment before slowly dissipating, and he closed his eyes with its departure. The quietness of the room, Ron's incessant snores, a muffled whimper from the direction of Wayne Hopkins' bed, was lulling and soothing in its own way.

Not quite as soothing as the presence of a warm body leaning against his own, however.

When Draco moved, he was so silent that Harry almost didn't realise he was moving at all until he was at his side. He flinched, snapping his head up from its bowed retreat, and stared at where Draco had dropped to the cold floor at his side. He adjusted himself slightly, settling the silk folds of his nightrobe around himself, before assuming the position he'd been in moments before but a window's length away.

He glanced towards Harry. Harry stared back. Draco blinked. "What? I'm not heartless, you know."

"Why…?"

Draco shrugged. "Because I like it, too. You're not the only one to make some strange discoveries in the past few months." Shifting slightly, Draco adjusted himself until his shoulder propped against Harry's. "Is that wrong?"

Harry stared. Slowly, he shook his head. "No. It's not."

"Good. Then we have another agreement of sorts in place."

Tipping his head back against the wall, Draco closed his eyes once more. His calm aloofness, his relaxed demeanour, was reinstated, but Harry thought it looked a little different now. A little less fool-proof. Almost without realising it, he found himself smiling just a little.

Shaking his head, Harry leant a little more comfortably against Draco. The warmth that spread from the point of contact wasn't quite the same as the warmth from the Warming Charms throughout the room, but it staved off the chill. The otherwise unshakable chill, the one that had nothing to do with frost or icy draughts.

_If it's for both of us, then it's not quite so bad, _Harry thought, closing his own eyes as he mimicked Draco's posture and rocked his head back against the wall. _At least I'm not alone._

* * *

When Harry woke, he was warm.

The sun hadn't quite risen. Eyes cracking open, squinting through the skewed lenses of his glasses, the still-frosted window bared at his side was only faintly illuminated by a hazy grey dawn. For a moment, Harry stared in groggy lethargy, sleep-addled mind flicking through the list of acknowledgements that it had taken to conducting in his months on the run with Hermione and Ron.

Morning – yes, it was definitely morning.

A Wednesday morning. He was fairly sure it was Wednesday, with that surety increasing with each lazy blink.

And where…? Hogwarts. At Hogwarts, in the Dragon's Nest boys dormitory. Yes, he could remember that, too. He'd fallen to sleep beside the window, which wasn't for the first time. He usually didn't manage to properly sleep, though, spending the night staring across the dark grounds before clambering stiffly to his feet and retreating to his cold bed before the rest of the dormitory began to haul itself into wakefulness.

But he'd slept. He'd really slept. And he was warm and comfortable, the press of his cheek against smooth material soothing, the rise and fall of the warmth beneath him…

Harry blinked. Straightening from where he'd been slumping, curled, he peered up at Draco, reclined as he'd been the night before in his languid seat and eyes still closed in sleep. Harry could remember that now, too. The brief but starkly revealing conversation they'd shared, the moment of commiseration and understanding, Draco sitting at his side and the comfort of contact from their touching shoulder.

They weren't touching shoulders anymore. Or not just shoulders. Pushing himself more decidedly upright, Harry cast a bemused glance around himself, at Draco who still slept, before scrubbing a hand across his face. He was sitting on Draco again, which wasn't a surprise anymore, really. Except that this time it was more than just 'on top of him'. Facing chest to chest, his legs framing Draco's where they extended before him, Harry realised that it must have been more of an embrace than anything as simple as sitting on Draco's lap. Draco's arms even rested in a loose clasp around his waist as though to embrace him in return.

Harry scrubbed his face once more, jostling his glasses as he smeared the sleep and confusion from his eyes. He didn't quite know how they'd ended up in such a position. He didn't know if it had been at Draco's sleepy encouragement or – more likely – his own actions, the drive to be close, to touch and to feel that wordless comfort that seemed almost a necessity to him these days. What was more disorienting, however, was that it didn't feel wrong. It didn't feel like a taboo, or even all that odd. Just unexpected.

Pursing his lips, Harry glanced over his shoulder at the dark dormitory. Snores and the gentle squeak of springs still added a quiet backdrop to the otherwise silent morning, and not a single person had started to awaken yet, but it wouldn't be long. Harry should get up, should retreat to his bed before anyone noticed, before they saw that not only was he not sleeping properly – Ron already regularly commented on that – but that he'd taken his sleeplessness into Draco's company where Draco had, somehow, unwittingly, fixed the problem.

"What's wrong?"

Turning back to Draco, Harry met his bleary gaze as he too dredged himself from sleep. Regardless of a night spent in what was surely an uncomfortable position, he looked barely worse for wear, which was fairly typical of him. Harry could still remember in the war, at Malfoy Manor, even during his trial and that of his parents – Draco always fought to maintain a well-groomed, immaculate visage. A night spent on the floor, leaning against the wall with Harry draped over him like a misshapen blanket, had added only a faint stiffness to his movements as he rolled his shoulders, the barest of unruly tufts to his usually pristine hair.

"Sorry," Harry said, keeping his voice to a whisper. "Did I wake you up?"

Draco shook his head and raised a hand to his head. As if he'd automatically felt its disorderliness, he pressed upon the slight mess of his hair, erasing it in an instant. "No," he said, his voice thick and a little hoarse with sleep. "I was already waking up."

"No, you weren't."

"I was, actually."

Harry snorted. "You were dead to the world, is what you were. Although, I'm surprised you managed to sleep at all, what with, you know." He gestured down to himself, to Draco and where Harry still sat on top of him. There wasn't all that much between them in size difference; it must have been uncomfortable –

"I'm comfortable enough," Draco said, as though he'd heard Harry's thoughts. When Harry glanced up at him, he shrugged. "You make a fairly functional blanket."

"Gee, thanks."

"You're welcome. It appears you've found your purpose in life."

"I'm happy to hear it. Just like it looks like you've found yours."

"From your perspective?" Draco's eyebrow rose. "You seem to have forgotten I'd been informed of my status in your eyes for several weeks now. You've certainly made a habit of reminding me of it."

Harry winced. A habit. Was that a bad thing? "Sorry," he muttered, glancing down at himself again, at Draco's lazy recline that was probably not as comfortable as he was pretending it was. Maybe he was overstepping his boundaries. Shifting in place, he rose onto his knees to to climb to his feet. "I'll just – maybe I should just –"

Draco's arms tightened briefly, just slightly but enough that Harry paused. When he glanced down at Draco, it was to find his face blankly composed but staring up at Harry within unblinking focus. All residue of sleep had been erased, just like the slight mess of his hair.

"It's fine," Draco said. "I'm not bothered to get up right now anyway."

"Aren't I squashing you?" Harry asked.

"No."

"It's not annoying?"

"You're asking that now, after four whole weeks?"

Harry pulled a face, though had to accept the reprimand for what it was. That was certainly true. He didn't move, however, until Draco nudged him with a sighed, "you're warm enough, so it suits us both. If it bothers you that someone will see, just move when they start waking up."

Harry cast another glance over his shoulder. At least for that moment, he didn't really care what the rest of the boys in the dormitory thought. Maybe he should have, but the soothing aftermath of the first decent night sleep he'd had in months more than overrode it. Slowly, he settled back onto Draco's lap and, at Draco's readjustment, back against his chest in the sighing slump he'd assumed in the mindlessness of sleep.

It really was warm. And comforting. And… right. It felt simply right.

"Thanks," Harry murmured, cheek resting against Draco's shoulder that didn't feel as disagreeably hard as it perhaps should have.

"Are you always so sincere and appreciative this early in the morning?"

Harry snorted. "What, you'd prefer I poked shit at you?"

"I was just asking."

Harry closed his eyes against the pale grey of dawn. "Maybe. Or maybe it's just nicer not to argue with you sometimes. So shoot me for only just realising, okay?"

Draco didn't reply. He didn't shoot him down, or even grunt in acknowledgement. He simply sat and allowed Harry to benefit from his warm proximity. He even left his loosely cradling arms where they were, and Harry found he was nothing if not grateful for the allowance. That it came from Draco, once rival and once prat, didn't seem to matter in the least.

* * *

A/N: Thank you to all of the lovely people who have been reading and reviewing! I know I haven't gotten back to you all yet but I'm working on it. I appreciate each and every review so, so much, though, and every one inspires me to keep going :)  
I hope you continue to enjoy the story!


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

"Oh, fuck."

"Don't."

"You're – Merlin, you're really –?"

"Say another word and I'll seriously consider killing you."

"A word to you or to anyone else?"

The words filtered into Harry's dozing mind, weaving into the vague dream shrouding him. A part of him knew that they weren't really of his own making, that the words themselves came from somewhere else, but he was simply so relaxed. Warm, comfortable, and nothing if not disinclined to climb out of his languid stasis.

He would have been content to remain that way and ignore the slightly shrill almost-whisper from somewhere over his shoulder if Draco hadn't shifted beneath him. If the arm that had been hooked loosely around Harry's waist hadn't tensed, the fingers felt through his shirt digging in just enough to be noticeably different from a casual resting touch.

Stirring, Harry drew breath and released it in a heavy, reluctant sigh. He blinked his eyes open, squinting blurrily into the dark depths of the library beyond their quiet niche, and just as reluctantly lifted his chin from Draco's shoulder.

Sitting as he was had become just as habitual in the past few weeks as had been sitting in Draco's lap. Chest to chest, Harry's arms over Draco's shoulders and his legs draped over the sides of the chair alongside Draco's thighs, it was surprisingly comfortable. Not only for sitting – and sleeping, as he'd found himself doing more often than in his own bed – but for studying, too. Harry had worked out that, with the back of a second chair behind Draco's own to act as a prop, it was rather easy to read a textbook. Even to go so far as to write notes, though that took a balancing act that Harry found himself increasingly prepared to juggle. With so much time dedicated to studying for his NEWTs, it was a blessed discovery.

To be a bit closer to Draco, to his warmth and the solidity of his body, had become a steadying pillar in the past few months. Creeping rapidly up to Christmas as they were, Harry couldn't help but feel the need to abuse the strange agreement they'd undertaken, the unscheduled but similarly agreed upon meetups they undertook. The holiday break wasn't particularly long, but when Harry was barely sleeping away from the hours in Draco's company…

For the first time since he'd begun attending Hogwarts, Harry was reconsidering his enthusiasm for visiting the Burrow for Christmas that year. A foolish thought, but nonetheless real.

Scrubbing his eyes, nearly dislodging his glasses as he did so, Harry crawled back to proper wakefulness. He felt Draco tense beneath him. "What is it?" he asked.

"It's nothing," Draco said, short and sharp.

Harry frowned. "What?"

"It's nothing to worry about. Sorry we woke you."

We? Blinking again, shrugging aside the last of his grogginess, Harry twisted in Draco's lap just enough to glance over his shoulder. As he did, his stomach dropped to his feet. _Oh, shit._

Pansy stood at the entrance of their study area, planted between the end of the two aisles with her hand resting forgotten on the bag slung over her shoulder. She didn't appear angry. Not upset, or outraged, or even amused. She didn't seem to be anything, for that matter. Instead, her face was a mask of utter blankness, much as it had consistently been that year. Much as Draco's used to be all the time before Harry somehow managed to peek beneath it.

Harry swallowed. He didn't know Pansy. He didn't speak to her like he did Draco, and though the icy derision they'd one held for one another had thawed, that particular bridge had never been crossed. Neither had it been attempted with Blaise, the only other person that Harry saw Draco spend any time with. When he and Draco were together, it was only the two of them. Their respective friends were outliers by further unspoken agreement.

"Potter," Pansy said in a flat monotone.

Harry's head jerked in an awkward nod of recognition. "Pansy."

Pansy's lips thinned, as though Harry had misspoken. She didn't eye him for long, however, shifting her attention back to Draco barely a moment later. "When did this start?" she asked, low enough that, even in the dark, echoing depths of the library, the words didn't carry.

"It's nothing," Draco said.

"Really? Because –"

"I said it's nothing, Pansy. Definitely not what you're thinking."

His fingers dug into Harry's back, the line of his fingernails just felt, but Harry didn't care. He barely registered it at all, gaze switching back and forth between Draco and Pansy as they volleyed between them. The hardness of Draco's tone, different to what he always used when they spoke these days, was unexpected in being directed towards Pansy. They were friends… weren't they? Or had Harry missed something.

"Come the fuck on, Draco," Pansy said, somehow still maintaining her monotony despite her curse. She folded her arms across her chest. "You can't take me for a blind fool."

"I'm not."

"This," Pansy jerked a chin towards them both, though Harry was given the distinct impression she more pointed at himself specifically, "doesn't just happen for no reason. You didn't tell me you were –"

"Because it's not." Draco sliced across her words again. He was so still, so tense beneath Harry, that Harry felt the sudden urge to scoot away from him. The feeling hadn't struck him for a long time, and it felt somehow… hurtful. "Pansy, it's not."

"Draco –"

"I said, it's not."

"But you told me – at the start of term, you told me that –"

"Yes," Draco interrupted again, his hand curling into the back of Harry's shirt. "And I meant it. But it's not."

Pansy opened her mouth to retort, then paused. Her eyes narrowed. She glanced at Harry, back at Draco, then to Harry again. Something like understanding dawned, flicking aside the residues of her blank mask. "Oh. You've got to be kidding me."

"Pansy," Draco warned.

"He doesn't know." She scoffed. "You don't even know, do you, Potter?"

"Know?" Harry frowned. He turned to Draco, was met by his hard profile staring murder at Pansy, then back to Pansy herself. "What are you talking about?"

"This is so fucked up." Pansy scoffed again. Shaking her head, she half turned. When she jerked her head, it was to point at Draco this time. "I don't know how the fuck this even happened, but if he doesn't know… Draco, you're a fucking idiot."

"I know," Draco said. He sounded like he chewed each word before spitting them out.

"Tell him. You bloody idiot, just tell him." A third scoff, the curl of a derisive smile touching the corner of her lips. It didn't look like a happy sneer, nor even particularly amused. "Apparently Potter's not so far disinclined as you'd thought. News to me, but apparently not to you."

Without another word, she tossed her head, spun on her heel, and stalked away. The click of her shoes resounded more than her words had, though it was those words that echoed in Harry's head. Slowly, he turned back to Draco.

What it had all been about, he didn't know. Or at least he didn't think so. Pansy hadn't taken to cordiality quite as Harry and Draco had, but she wasn't outright antagonistic. Not anymore. But her words, the lash of her tongue that struck like a whip, were edged with real insult. Harry might not know her, might not be friends with her, but he knew when someone sincerely called another person an idiot. Pansy had meant it.

What she meant with everything else, though, he wasn't quite so sure. 'You don't know', she'd said of Harry, and he didn't. Just as he didn't know why, even after Pansy's departure, Draco sat as rigid and frozen as he'd been since she arrived. It could have been that they'd been found out, a kind of horror that was unexpectedly not as horrifying as Harry had thought it would be, but no. No, that wasn't it. Harry was almost sure of it.

"Draco?" he asked, lowly and almost tentatively. "What was that about?"

Draco didn't reply.

"What did she mean?"

Still no reply. Draco glared at the empty space Pansy had left as though staring long enough and hard enough might bring her back so he could properly murder her. He'd manage it easily, too, with the cold anger that Harry felt all but radiating from him. Draco was always been volatile, always ready with snapping retorts and sneering rebuttals – or he had been, years ago. But this was something else. This was foreign, and Harry couldn't help but shrink away from it slightly.

This wasn't comfortable. This wasn't normal. This was… There was something wrong.

Glancing down at himself, at their proximity that remained despite Pansy's intrusion, Harry felt the sudden urge to get away from it. If there was something wrong, something about what Pansy said that involved him, then they should talk about it. Not, however, in the blissful comfort that Harry always sought. It wasn't even there anymore – not at that moment.

Levering himself slowly, almost delicately, with the arms of the chair, Harry climbed to his feet. He couldn't look at Draco, glancing around himself to the table, to their textbooks, to the notes he'd barely started that day, and shifted between his feet. He chewed his lip, gnawing over the urge to slink in Pansy's wake. He should leave. If Draco was pissed off – about Pansy's intrusion, her discovery, that she would make his life hell from there on out – Harry would probably be the last person Draco wanted to see. Even had Harry been comfortable right where he'd been, he wouldn't force his company upon Draco. It didn't feel right to do so. Maybe once upon a time he would have rolled his eyes and called Draco out on being a tosser, would have made light of the situation or even revelled in his sour mood, but not now. Not anymore.

"Are you leaving?"

Twitching at short, flat words, Harry glanced up at him. Draco's face was as cool and smooth, as unremarkable and unemotional, as it had been at the beginning of the year, and it was disconcerting. Harry shifted between his feet once more, edging backwards until he butted against the table behind him. He didn't even notice that Draco had still held his shirt until his hand was pulled free. It fell loosely, almost limply, onto the wooden arm of his chair.

"I figured," Harry said slowly, "that you might want me to."

Draco blinked slowly. Finally, he turned from Pansy's absence towards Harry instead. "Why?"

"What – why? What do you mean why?"

"Why would I want you to leave?"

Harry frowned. He glanced after Pansy once more, then back to Draco. Draco regarded him with unerring expressionlessness, and Harry had never been good at reading people in the first place. He had no idea what was going on beneath the surface of Draco's dark gaze.

Absently scuffing the side of his head, Harry shrugged. "I don't know what's going on. I mean, I don't really understand what Pansy was talking about, but she clearly annoyed you. And it had something to do with me, so –"

"So, aren't you curious?"

Harry huffed. He settled back against the table, propping his hands on the edge. There wasn't much distance between him and Draco, only enough that their knees weren't quite touching, but he was more aware of it in that moment than he'd been in months. "Of course I bloody well am. But I'm not an asshole. You clearly don't want to talk about it."

"Clearly?"

"Come on, give me some credit. I'm not that slow."

Draco's lips thinned. A muscle in his cheek twitched. He stared up at Harry, and though he didn't frown, Harry was given the impression that he was being scowled at nonetheless. A long pause hung between them, the silence thick, and Harry's skin was crawling before it was alleviated. He'd never been a particularly patient person.

But Draco snapped first. Finally. Like ice abruptly fracturing, his cool façade shattered.

He pushed himself to his feet in a fluid motion. Harry jerked backwards, but Draco didn't lurch towards him. Instead, he swept from his seat and away, pacing the length of their small study area, and then back again. Across, and back again. He clicked his tongue, all but stamped his feet, and threw a fierce glare around himself as though really hoping that something might catch fire, if only to distract him from whatever thoughts were causing him such frustration.

Harry watched him. He could only watched, biting his tongue to hold his silence. Rather than feel the urge to take flight even more, however, Draco's agitation was somehow calming. This was more familiar. Harry could handle this. At least it was better than the wall of blank-faced nothingness.

"What the hell, Draco?" he asked as, taking another turn, Draco muttered something short and sharp beneath his breath that sounded like a curse.

"I'm thinking," Draco snapped.

"Okay. Good." They were getting somewhere, at least. Why it mattered, Harry wasn't quite sure, but he found he didn't like seeing Draco so unnerved. Not at all. That his dislike was so far juxtaposed to the previous pleasure he would have felt for the situation years ago didn't pass unnoticed, but it was negligible at that moment. "Thinking about what?"

"About how I'm going to bloody well say this." Draco's hands systematically bunched into fists and released at his sides as he took another turn. "I can't – I don't know how –"

"Just say it," Harry suggested, which earned him a glare that he easily shrugged off. "How bad can it be?"

"Appalling."

"Wonderful. Well, can you maybe do it without acting like a circling dragon? I'm kind of expecting you to start spitting fire any second now."

Draco ground to a halt. It was so sudden, such a jerking stop, that Harry almost heard the screech of breaks. His head whipped towards Harry, and for a moment all Harry could see was his flushed cheeks. His eyes unexpectedly blown wide. His forehead contorted into what wasn't quite a frown but something else. It was such a vast difference to barely moments before that Harry didn't know what to make of it. He could only stare as Draco stared back at him, concerned and –

"I like you."

\- more than a little… confused. Harry frowned. "What?"

Draco's exhalation hissed through his teeth. He took a turn in place, muttered something, drew his eyes to the distant ceiling, then resettled them on Harry. "Of course you would be the type of person to be utterly oblivious."

"I'm – what?"

"I like you," Draco repeated, a little louder this time. "Fancy, if you prefer. Care, though that might be a little extreme. Not as casual as fond, but not quite as intense as enamoured, something in between that is foolish but I can't seem to help, and is more than a little horrifying when considering everything, and who you are, and who I am, and –"

"Wait, wait, wait." Harry held up a hand. He closed his eyes briefly, struggling for a moment, before opening them. "Are you serious?"

"Do I look like I'm fucking joking to you?" Draco said, voice rising even more.

"You – you actually liked me?"

Draco scoffed, a sound remarkably similar to that Pansy had made before she disappeared. He raised his eyes to the ceiling once more. "Of course I do. Why the bloody hell else would I have let you sit in my lap?"

"But you…" _There are reasons, _Harry rationalised in a very small part of his mind. _I have reasons, other people would… they'd surely have them too, but… _"You mean you seriously like me?"

"Dammit, Pott – no, Harry. Gods dammit, Harry. Do you honestly think I'm the sort of person who lets just anyone take up fucking residence in my lap? Do you?"

He didn't. Harry had to give him that. "But you – you never said –"

"Do you have any idea how fucking crazy I've been, trying to accept the fact that I like your fucking face and you're not as much of an asshole as I always thought you were? That you could actually be a decent person, and that you saved my life, and you spoke up at the trials of people that everyone knows you're supposed to hate, and you didn't ask for anything? How the fuck could I not think differently of you? And then you up and make it even harder for me with what by anyone's standards is incredibly unexpected and foreign by randomly just – just going and fucking sitting on me? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

When Draco stumbled to a halt, he was breathing heavily. There was a desperate cast to his expression, an edge that Harry had never seen before. It wasn't angry. It wasn't quite terrified, either, or at least not the kind of terror that Harry had seen before – in Draco, in his friends, or in every other person who'd been at the Battle of Hogwarts. This was something else, something more complicated, and Harry didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to say.

Draco… liked him.

No. Surely not. Not like that. But he'd said he did. They might tease and taunt one another, but there had never been a prank like this before. Not when they were younger and certainly not now. And Pansy… what Pansy had said… Harry found himself glancing towards the point she'd vacated. It kind of fit. He'd just –

_Never would have thought that, _a small, dumbfounded voice murmured in his head, and Harry could only agree just as dumbly.

"Um," was all he could manage, for what should he do? What should be –? "I don't know what to say."

"I know," Draco said harshly. He gave a sharp shake of his head, lowering his gaze. "And neither do I, because I can't help feeling utterly stupid things, and you can't help that you don't."

Without another word, he strode from the alcove. His robes flared behind him for the speed of his steps, and Harry could have sworn there was a gust of wind to aid his flight. The silent, stagnant emptiness he left behind struck Harry with an unprecedented ferocity; in a state of utter confusion, it was all he could do to fold his arms around himself and sink into the seat Draco had left coldly empty.

* * *

The hubbub of the entire student body was a buzzing storm of voices rebounding throughout the Entrance Hall. Walking alongside Ron and Hermione, Harry glanced at it only briefly as they descended the stairs. Travel pack slung over his shoulder with little more than the bare necessities packed, he was barely aware of where his feet took him or what either of his friends were saying. Just as it had been for the last week, his mind was decidedly elsewhere. Decidedly fixed upon someone else.

He still couldn't believe it. Not really. It felt so impossible, so unbelievable. Draco Malfoy liked him? Actually liked him, and as more than a throw rug to stave off the chill of the library, or a delivery boy to bring him meals when he didn't want to fetch them for himself? More than an annoyance to be tolerated who increasingly crowded his space and used him as a misshapen mattress?

Impossible. And yet, time and again as Harry had spent sleepless night after sleepless night lost in thought, he kept hearing Draco's words. He kept seeing his expression, wrought into a picture of frustration and agitation, so far removed from his usual cool composure. Draco seemed to let his guard down a little more around Harry these days, but not that much. Certainly not that much.

_Because he likes me_, Harry thought. _He actually seriously likes me._

It wasn't only because Draco was who he was. It was as much because of who Harry was – not only an ex-Gryffindor, someone on the opposite side of the war, but also a boy. Boys didn't fancy boys were Harry came from. He was almost sure that any one of the Dursley's would have spluttered in horror before attempting to beat him black and blue for even considering it. If they'd thought he was, that there was any chance he was…

_Am I?_

That was the crux of it. The most confusing part, somehow even more confounding than Draco's admission. Harry had been raised in a world where he wasn't explicitly told that such feelings were wrong, but it had been assumed knowledge nonetheless. Boys were born, grew up energetic and frequently meat-headed, dated a pretty girl, and as often as not ended up marrying them. There was no room for another boy in the timeline but as a friend, a classmate, a colleague. Harry knew that.

But when it came to Draco… No, he hadn't considered it, but it didn't feel bad. Not in the least.

Maybe it was because he'd been in the Wizarding world for too long, a world that couldn't give a rats arse about such insignificant characteristics of a relationship. Maybe it was because of what he'd seen in those around him, what had blossomed between friends and classmates, what he witnessed evolve first hand yet only fully form that year between Seamus and Dean. It could even be because of what hints from Mrs. Weasley and the likes had him thinking of Sirius. It didn't feel bad. Not wrong.

The problem was that Harry didn't know how to feel. He didn't know what he was supposed to feel, nor what truly lay beneath the mess of his jumbled thoughts. What was between himself and Draco had been a matter of convenience, of comfort from simple contact but otherwise detached and unemotional. At what point it had begun to become something else, Harry didn't rightly know, except that he knew it had. He could realise that now.

It could have been when Draco had first lent him an offhanded word of advice about what to study. Maybe the first time that Harry had thought to grab an extra sandwich at lunch. It could have been when they'd made their agreement in the first place, voicing it aloud, or even before that, when Harry had deliberately sought Draco's company. He simply didn't know.

But that distinct difference existed. He was certain of that. He just wasn't sure whether what he felt was the reliance of comfort, the tentative compassion towards a tentative friend, or… something else. It was baffling, and was a significant – if far from being the only – reason he'd barely slept a wink in days.

"… zoning out again, right? Harry?"

Blinking up from where he'd been watching his walking feet, Harry glanced around himself for a moment before latching onto Ron's expectant face. "What?" he asked, shoving aside his distraction.

Ron smiled a little, though he didn't seem particularly amused. More concerned than anything else. "You right there, mate?"

Harry stared at him, then glanced towards Hermione, frowning at Ron's side. They'd paused at the edge of the Entrance Hall, alongside the door to wait for the professors to give them their go-ahead to leave for the carriages, and Harry hadn't even noticed.

"I'm fine," Harry said, raising his voice slightly to make it over the noise around them. "But sorry, I missed that. What did you say?"

"Nothing important," Hermione said, frown deepening, but Ron spoke over the top of her. "Just that you're zoning out again. You've been doing that a lot lately, but even more the past couple of days. Are you sleeping badly again?"

At what stage had he even been sleeping well? Harry considered for a moment, then shook his head a little ruefully. With Draco. When he'd been with Draco and using him as a pillow as much as a seat. It shouldn't have been as comfortable as it was, but – yes, it was definitely comfortable. Or it had been.

"Yeah, not too great." Harry drew his gaze across the sea of chattering students, avoiding his friends' keen eyeballing. "But it's fine. Probably just bogged down with schoolwork."

"You're really throwing everything into it this year, huh?" Ron's scoff wasn't scornful, but it still carried the weight of incredulity. "It almost seems unbelievable that we used to skimp out of homework, right?"

"Not that I don't commend you both for studying more," Hermione said, "but maybe you do need to slow down a bit, Harry. Take a break every now and again."

"I'm fine," Harry said, gaze drifting.

"I mean it. You disappear every afternoon to the library, and… I know you say you study better outside of the common room and away from people, even if it's nothing that we're doing wrong or to annoy you, but –"

"Hold that thought for a second, Hermione," Harry interrupted. He spared her a glance, long enough to catch her with her mouth hanging open but momentarily paused, before ducking quickly into the crowd. Dodging around students, weaving through juniors and all but stepping over first years, he hastened towards the opposite stairwell, all but running as he neared the bottom step.

"Draco," he called when he was close enough to be heard.

Draco glanced up from where he'd lowered his small case to his side. Pansy and Blaise stood on either side of him, but as Harry approached, as if they understood the bid for privacy he silently asked for, they slipped away to just out of hearing range. Draco didn't even watch them go.

"Harry," he said, nodding his head shortly. It was more formal than he'd treated Harry all year, even if he did still use his proper name.

Words died on Harry's tongue. He hadn't even known what he was going to say, but any sense of intelligibility fled from him before Draco's cool, composed façade. It had been a while since he'd worn that before Harry. It was never completely gone – never except for that brief conversation a week before – but it hadn't been entirely complete, either. Harry almost flinched to see it reimposed.

"You've been avoiding me," blurted out before Harry had the good sense to withhold it.

Draco blinked. The hint of a frown touched his brow before smoothing away almost immediately. "I was under the impression that was the desired outcome of our conversation."

"What the bloody hell gave you that impression?"

This time, Draco's frown returned and stayed. "What do you mean?"

"When did I ever give any indication that I didn't want to hang out with you?"

"Hang out -?"

"Because I don't remember saying anything about that." Harry pursed his lips, folding his arms across his chest. "Actually, I pretty distinctly remember you getting up and leaving before I could properly say anything back to you."

Draco's frown sat so low it shadowed his eyes. His jaw visibly clenched, a muscle bulging slightly before releasing. "It would be the logical assumption and subsequent reaction," he said slowly, as though speaking to someone particularly dim-witted. "I just professed that I had feelings for you, while you've been using me as a well-padded and insulated seat for the past several months –"

"A fucking what?"

Harry snapped angrily before he could help himself. As soon as the words burst forth, he realised just how confused and frustrated he was. The latter was certainly a feeling he hadn't experienced with such heat of late, but yes, he was frustrated. Really frustrated, and maybe even a little bit pissed off. It wasn't just about their agreement either, or that Draco had swept it aside without question on the basis of his own assumption and expectation.

Exhaling in a huff, Harry raked a hand through his hair. He drew a deep breath and released that one too before attempting a proper reply. In that time, Draco only stared at him, still frowning, still tense.

"Look, Draco," Harry began, caught himself from snapping about Draco being a fucking idiot, and continued. "Can we just talk about this, maybe? You buggered off before I could say anything, so I didn't even get to give you a proper answer."

"A proper answer?" Draco echoed, almost faintly.

Harry nodded. "Yeah. That."

"You… what do you…?"

"Just – can you just give me till after Christmas?" Harry hoped it didn't sound as much like a faintly desperate compromise as he thought it did. "Then we can properly talk, okay?"

It took a long, frozen moment, but eventually Draco gave a hesitant nod. "Alright," he said slowly. "Are you…?"

Harry deliberately lowered his hand from his head before he started raking his hair out of his scalp. "Am I what?"

Draco shook his head slightly, though it looked more to jostle himself from his stillness. "How are you sleeping?"

Harry almost laughed. Eyeing Draco, he raised his eyebrows pointedly. Draco might have been wearing nothing but a smoothly composed mask earlier, but it wasn't enough to hide the shadows under his eyes. "About as well as you are, I'm guessing."

Draco's face worked in a series of twitches before he managed to smooth it once more. Nodding curtly, he lifted his chin. "Alright, then. Until after Christmas."

"Keep an ear out," Harry said, then turned on his heel and dove back into the riot of students. He fought the urge to glance over his shoulder as he made his way back to his friends to be met by their open surprise. In Ron's case, it was open-mouthed surprise.

"Since when have you been all buddy-buddy with Mal – Draco?" Ron asked, correcting himself at the last moment to Hermione's slight nod of approval.

Harry shrugged, unnecessarily hitching the strap of his pack higher onto his shoulder. "He's been helping me, is all."

"What, with the potions study?"

Harry almost laughed again. It felt a little hysterical this time, and not at all removed from the prickle of warmth flushing up his throat. _God, if it was only that it would be so much easier to wrap my head around. _Glancing over his shoulder one final time, Harry caught a glimpse of Draco's pale head, his gaze lowered and expression blank. "Yeah," he said. "That."

Ron said something else, and Hermione replied with a touch of bright enthusiasm, but Harry barely heard them. He might not know his own thoughts or feelings, or what he was going to tell Draco on the other side of Christmas, but he felt better with a hint of direction. Steadied, like a boat in a tumultuous sea abruptly lent a beaming light from a lighthouse.

Giving a mental nod, Harry fell into step with his friends as, following a distant professor's instruction, the tide of students began to peel through the doorway. If nothing else, he would have a lot to think about that Christmas.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

Christmas came and went. It was vibrant, loud, and rich with the sounds of music, the smells of Mrs. Weasley's cooking, and the thrumming warmth of good company. Even with the slightly forced undertones, the knowledge that there were seats missing to avoid looking at empty spaces, it was nice.

That didn't mean that Harry slept any better that night.

He was thinking. Always thinking. 'Zoning out', Ron had called it, and Harry supposed he did that too, losing time when he wasn't even deliberately turning thoughts over in his mind. Yet where once it had been in quiet contemplation, engrossed in pained thoughts of days gone by and mistakes made, of internal discovery and dumbfounded fascination, now it was mostly something else. Almost exclusively something else.

The seat at the window in Ron's room wasn't all that comfortable. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable either, but it wasn't anything special. Harry didn't mind either way; it wasn't like the solace of the window itself, pulled closed but otherwise bared wide and open to inhale the thin wisps of moonlight, needed proper seating. There wasn't anywhere quite so comfortable as what Harry had found at Hogwarts anyway. Who he found.

Knees drawn to his chest, chin resting atop them, and arms locked to stave off the kind of chill that couldn't be deflected by Warming Charms, Harry gazed out at the stretch of the Weasley's garden. He barely saw it, but that didn't really matter any more than the simplicity of the chair. Lost as he was, chewing over the question and the confusion that had been niggling at him for days, he didn't even notice when Ron's snores ceased.

"You still not sleeping?"

Starting, Harry glanced towards the dark corner where Ron's bed was wedged. Ron was propped up on his elbows, the oval of his face pale and visibly squinting, frowning just a little. Harry smiled, shrugging in the face of Ron's concern. "Nah. Not tonight."

"You mean not tonight too," Ron corrected.

"Yeah, that." Resettling his chin, Harry returned to gazing at the window. Through the window. Beyond that. Idly, he wondered if Draco was sleeping that night, or if he was just as sleepless as Harry found himself. Given his circumstances and how often they'd found one another similarly incapacitated, Harry doubted the former. Definitely when considering the home that Draco would be returning to.

What was he doing? Who was he with? What was he thinking? Harry had never considered Draco in such a light before, but then, he'd never had the need to. They'd always been at verbal – and sometimes physical – blows, or it had been… something else. Something more than that, an unexpected relief and comfort that Harry had found in the most unlikely of places, and then something else again.

A habit. A comfortable habit. Shared study hours, shared company, the odd word or two, but it hadn't been more than that – had it? Nothing more than simple companionship, and Harry hadn't needed or sought more than what they'd had. But then Draco had said… he'd said…

A scuffle across the room, the shuffle of blankets and then feet, preceded Ron's rising from his bed. Harry eyed him sidelong without turning his way. "You don't have to get up," he said.

"Yeah, I know," Ron replied, making his way to the window nonetheless. He plopped down into the seat across from Harry with a heavy sigh that evolved into a yawn. "I'll just keep you company."

"It's fine. Really."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Another yawn had Ron slumping back into his chair, rocking it slightly on its feet. "Did you actually get any sleep at all?"

Harry shrugged.

"I take that as a no." At Harry's small smile, Ron sighed again. "Yeah, I thought so. I wasn't sleeping too great back at Hogwarts either, but I thought being home might change that. I guess not. It just feels…"

He trailed off, but Harry didn't need him to finish the thought. It was self-explanatory enough, because Harry felt the same. The Burrow was the same, but the people in it were irreversibly changed from who they'd been.

"Yeah," he murmured, and silence fell between them.

It wasn't uncommon for Harry to find himself with company in his sleeplessness. With the exception of the final week of school, Draco had always joined him. Less common was that such accompaniment would be Ron. It wasn't a bad thing, far from it, but Harry found himself glancing towards Ron once, twice, and again before he realised that he was no longer drifting in the throes of confusing yet somehow comfortable thought. It didn't annoy him, but it was a little saddening; Harry was under no allusions that he'd been any closer to working out just what he thought and how he felt about the situation with Draco, but he'd hoped to at least spend the hours of unending sleeplessness a little productively.

Instead, he shrugged aside that possibility and turned to face Ron properly. "What's wrong?" he asked.

Ron didn't reply immediately. He was staring out the window himself, finding that detached listlessness that sometimes somehow helped but that Harry wasn't quite able to reach in Ron's silent company. Taking the moment to regard him, Harry prodded wordlessly at one of the countless questions that had been niggling at him of late. Ron's profile was cast in a pale wash, his long nose a sharp blade down the middle of his face, his cheekbones smattered by freckles that were washed to a shade of ruddy grey by the night that matched his hair. When Harry prodded a little more deliberately, he found… nothing. Nothing at all.

Ron was his friend. His best friend. He was a good-looking enough bloke, and Harry could acknowledge that he was fit, but - no. The flush of satisfied warmth that Harry felt with Draco, when he was sitting with him, leaning against him, soothed into sleep time and again, wasn't there. Harry didn't feel the urge to reach out and touch him, to climb into Ron's lap and sink into the softness of touch and closeness that held nothing more than just that.

Or it hadn't been more than that. Not at first, and not from Harry's perspective. He hadn't wanted more, but if Draco did? Now that Harry knew he might?

It was an itch Harry scratched at until he picked it open. Realisations and revelations, an unprecedented understanding of himself, had bombarded him in the months since the war had so violently ended. The twinging feeling of discomfort as often as horror or confusion wasn't unfamiliar to Harry anymore. What Draco had said, and the possibility it presented, was somehow a combination of the three with something else added on top.

"How do you know when you like someone?"

The words were out of Harry's mouth before he'd had any clue that he would be speaking them. He bit his lip instantly, switching his gaze to the window again as Ron glanced his way. That wasn't right. He didn't want to ask that. He didn't want to talk to anyone about what he was thinking, what he was feeling – or what he wasn't thinking or feeling.

But Ron was awake, and he'd always been a talkative person. Opening up an avenue, deliberately or otherwise, was more than incentive for Ron to take the question by the reins. "Is this about Ginny?" he asked. "Because if it is – Harry, I'm your best mate and everything, but that might be a little much for me."

Harry laughed. Or he tried to. It would have been good if he could manage to lighten the mood a little. "No," he said. "It's not about Ginny."

"Are you saying you… still like her?"

"No." Harry shook his head before resting his chin back onto his knees. "Not like that."

Ron nodded. Harry caught the gesture only from his periphery. "That's… I guess not good, but not so bad either, at least from my perspective. But then – when you like someone?"

"Just forget about it," Harry muttered. "It was a stupid thing to say."

"No, wait. Hold on." Straightening in his seat, the last vestiges of sleep dribbling from him, Ron fixed his attention wholly upon Harry. Harry didn't need to glance his way to know the entirety of it. "We hardly ever chat anymore. I mean, _at all_. I know study's crazy and all, and you prefer studying in the library by yourself –"

_By myself. Ha._

" – but I reckon we've hardly chatted properly for a good while now." Ron shifted, his chair squeaking, and sniffed in the way he did when he became a little awkward. "Look, I know I'm not too great at all the heavy talk and stuff, but I'll give it my best shot."

"To be honest, Ron, you're probably better than Hermione," Harry said. "No offence to her, but –"

"Yeah." Ron chuckled. "She's so smart in some ways but in others she really misses the mark."

He spoke with such fondness, such open and sure sincerity, that Harry couldn't help but look at him. Ron's smile, turned down at his slightly curled hands, was crooked, a dark curl above his chin washed as grey and white as the rest of his face. It illustrated the feelings that he clearly felt for Hermione nonetheless. They hadn't said anything, hadn't admitted anything to anyone and possibly not even to each other, but Harry knew. It was obvious.

"How did you know?" he asked quietly.

Ron glanced up from his hands. "Huh?"

"About Hermione."

To his credit, Ron didn't blush. It could have been that they were alone, just the two of them, or that the skewing effects of sleep had lingered more than Harry realised, but for once Ron didn't seem awkward at being called out. "I dunno," he said. "I just… felt it, I guess."

"Felt what?"

This time, Ron's chuckle was a little bashful. "I dunno. Feelings. About Hermione. And –" He caught himself, paused, then seemed to climb back from his momentary embarrassment. "I just always want to spend time with her. I want to be around her, even if we're doing something dead boring like studying. I just love talking to her, you know? Or watching her. Or being there so that every now and again she'll look at me, and I'll know she's noticed me and she's thinking about me."

Harry stared at Ron as he lowered his gaze back to his hands. His crooked smile had a slightly mischievous edge to it that mirrored the way he played distractedly with his long fingers. When he glanced up at Harry, it became a grin. "Sounds stupid, right?"

Harry shook his head but for a moment couldn't speak.

"Was it like that for you, too? With – you know, with Ginny? And Cho."

Pursing his lips, Harry thought. He stretched his memories, searching for the feelings that accompanied them. Whether from time or an absence of them entirely, he couldn't seem to reach them.

Harry slowly shook his head. "I don't think so. Sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

"Well, Ginny's still your sister, after all."

"Yeah, I haven't forgotten." In spite of his teasing words, Ron's smile died. "You never got that?"

"I don't…" Harry sunk his teeth into his lip. Was it the same? What Ron had described, how he felt – could it be the same? Harry didn't know, but talking, even intermittently, and sharing space, and just being together… Was it the same?

"Is it someone else?"

Harry's eyes flicked up towards Ron. He'd shifted slightly in his seat again, his elbows dropping onto his knees as he leant towards Harry. His face, so open and earnest, was nothing but accepting of whatever Harry would tell him.

"I don't know," Harry said, though with real confusion this time. Sliding his face down until his forehead rested on his knees, he wrapped his arms around his head instead. "I'm not sure if it's that."

"Then there is someone?" Harry didn't so much as grunt in reply, but Ron seemed to take his silence as an affirmative. "You know, I actually thought it might be. I asked Hermione –"

"You told Hermione?" Harry couldn't help but wince.

"Yeah, well, I couldn't just ask you straight off the bat. But she didn't know, and she said it wasn't any of my business, even though I reckon I made her curious. But Ginny – you know Ginny actually asked me about it, too."

Harry peeked up over his arms. "She did?" He wasn't sure if he was more surprised or horrified.

Ron nodded. "Reckon she's pretty cluey, you know."

"Must run in the family."

"Yeah. Maybe." A beat of silence met his words as Harry returned to chewing his lip, but Ron could never hold his tongue for long. "Do you want to tell me who it is, or -?"

Harry's attempted laugh failed just as dismally as the one before. "Yeah, uh, maybe not just yet."

"I take it it's someone at school, though." Ron nodded to himself. "I won't pick at it or anything, but what's the problem? Afraid you're not liked back?"

The problem was so multifaceted that the one element that wasn't problematic at all was almost laughable in being brought up. Harry shook his head, though it was a little stilted. He felt a flush of heat rise into his cheeks; it was strange, because usually Ron was the one to become easily flustered. How he stayed so serious and composed, so sincere, was a mystery. Had Ron always been like that, or was that something new? Something discovered, as Harry had made so many discoveries in the past year.

"No," Harry managed. "It's not that. He told me he liked me, see, and I don't – I don't know if –"

"If you like him back," Ron said. He nodded. "Right. I get it now. So, that's what's keeping you up at night? Or at least tonight, that is. Not sure if it's always been that."

"Yeah," Harry muttered, staring out the window as a smear of cloud shadowed the moon and briefly enveloped the garden in darkness. A second later and he jerked so violently he almost fell from his seat. He snapped his gaze towards Ron. "Shit."

Ron frowned. "What?"

"I didn't mean to – I mean, I didn't –"

"You alright, mate?"

Harry's groan sounded a little like a whimper as he buried his face back in his arms. He hadn't really thought about _that _part all that much, and the Wizarding world had been nothing but blatantly accepting of such skews from the Muggle norm, but… but to admit it…

"I didn't even mean to tell you it was a guy," Harry muttered. "I didn't know how you'd – you know, how you'd –"

Ron let him stumble for a moment before picking up the dangling thread. "How I'd react?"

"Yeah. That."

"I don't…" Ron trailed off only for a moment. "Oh, right. That Muggle thing."

_The Muggle thing. _It hadn't seemed like such a 'thing' in Harry's head. Not until it was accidentally voiced aloud. "Mm."

"I've never understood that."

"Yeah, well, you're not a Muggle."

"You're worried I'd have a problem with it?"

Once more, Harry peeked over his enfolding arms. It was perhaps the strangest conversation he and Ron had ever held, far more intimate than he'd thought either of them capable of – or at least with one another. But Ron didn't seem to have a problem with it, and Harry clasped the opportunity to smear out a niggling worry that had been prodding him for days with both hands.

Ron was frowning. His bottom lip protruded in a pout. He tried to reply three times before managing it. "I thought I'd made it pretty clear that I don't really care who you date. Or, like, I care, but not like that. I mean, you dated my bloody sister and all. There's nothing that could be harder to be okay with than that."

Harry wondered about that. He really did. After all, Draco was not only a man but also their mutual ex-rival. Ron still had difficulties with civility at times, even after months of living in the same dorm as Draco. Still, he sat silent and attentive, un-interrupting as Ron continued.

"I don't know if I've changed my tune more or something, but it really doesn't bother me who you date, and I mean it." He settled back in his chair, straight again, and rocked on the back legs slightly. "A boy or girl, even my sister, it doesn't bother me. Definitely not the boy thing. You remember when Seamus and Dean properly hooked up, right?"

At Harry's nod, he shrugged. "Why the bloody hell wouldn't I be happy for them? Why would I be as much so much of a tosser as to have the shits with them for deciding to date another bloke when it doesn't have anything to do with me? It's not like it really changes all that much, right? I mean, they were always hanging out anyway; now they just kiss every now and then, or sometimes they'll share the same bed at night. As long as I don't hear anything, why should I care?"

"You noticed that too, huh?" Harry asked, smiling faintly.

"Bit hard not to. They're not exactly trying to be subtle or anything." Ron regarded him, his frown easing slightly. "Is that your problem then? 'Cause I know Dean mentioned that, too – that he had a bit of a time of it, coming to terms with liking Seamus, since he comes from a Muggle family. Said they were all okay with it but it still felt a bit weird at first."

"Yeah, well, I think the Dursley's might be a little bit less than 'okay with it'," Harry said.

"So what? They're a bunch of assholes anyway, yeah? We're you're family, after all."

Harry couldn't help but smile properly this time, warmth unfurling in his chest. Ron was really saying all the right things that night. Harry would never have expected it of him.

"Is that it, then?"

Harry raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"That's what you're worried about? With all the feelings and whatnot. Does it help?" Ron didn't wait for Harry to reply before hastening into further assurances. "Because you know everyone would be totally supporting you to get over that weird Muggle mentality. All of us, and especially Ginny, even if she used to date you."

"Even Hermione?" Harry asked before he could help himself. He wasn't even sure if he wanted to know if she was capable of that kind of acceptance. After all, she'd been raised by Muggles too.

But Ron nodded immediately. "Definitely. She's not into thinking stuff like that. I mean, of all people, can you think of anyone who would be less likely to pick on someone for that kind of stuff?"

Harry wasn't sure, but then, he did know Hermione. Knew her, loved her, and had as much confidence in her unyielding loyalty as Ron did. Or at least nearly as much; Ron seemed in a whole league of his own these days when it came to Hermione.

"Thanks, Ron," he said. "I really appreciate it."

"Yeah, well," with an awkward chuckle, Ron's smooth-talking sincerity abruptly retreated. "No problem. Hope that helps you out a bit."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"And you know," sniffing again, Ron turned back out the window, "any time you wanted to tell us anything, or who this guy is? Even if you just wanted to tell me? Go for it. I'm all ears, Harry."

Grinning, Harry extended a foot to poke Ron's knee affectionately with a socked foot. "I'll hold you to that. I'm not sure you'd even want to hear what I've got to say."

Ron pulled a face, but he was grinning himself a heartbeat later. They fell into a momentary comfortable silence, Ron rocking back on his chair and Harry staring out the window once more, sliding hesitantly back into his thoughts with far more ease than he'd managed when Ron had first sat beside him. Only to be drawn out again when Ron tapped Harry's foot in return.

"Oi, hold on a second," he said, sitting forward with elbows on his knees once more. "This guy. You talk to him, right?"

Frowning, Harry nodded.

"And you hang out with him?"

A little more hesitantly, Harry nodded again.

Ron snorted. Head hanging, he gave it an almost mocking shake. "No way." Ron peered up at Harry with just his eyes. "Have you been disappearing to 'study' with him, then?"

The quotation marks with his fingers that Ron made only added to the stupidity of the situation. Harry hadn't a hope of withholding the flush that flooded his cheeks, heightening further as Ron returned to his grinning.

"It's not like that," Harry said, turning hastily to the window once more.

"Sure it's not."

"I don't always study with him, anyway."

"Sure. Sometimes it's not study at all, am I right?"

"No." Harry huffed. "I mean, sometimes I'm not with him."

"So, sometimes you're doing it by yourself?"

Harry didn't even need to glance towards Ron to be aware of the lewd double meaning of his remark. He could still see his shit-eating grin even without turning his way. "Sod off, you fucking ass," he muttered, hunching a little into his seat.

Ron snickered, but he didn't say anything further. Amusement was still radiating from him for a long time thereafter, however, and Harry found that he didn't really mind, in spite of being the butt of it. It added a much-needed lightness to the night as he dove back into heavier thoughts.

After all, he might have shared words with Ron, but there was still a very apparent question mark hanging in his head. It might be a little less daunting to consider now, but each time Harry glanced its way and saw Draco's face, he couldn't help but wonder. That wondering was more than enough fuel to chew through the hours of the winter night.

* * *

A/N: Thank you, as always, for the lovely reviews I've received from so many (you know who you are, wonderful people). I really appreciate it, and I promise I'll try my best to answer them as soon as possible!


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

"No studying. I mean none, like, yeah? At all. And yes, that includes you too, Hermione."

Everyone laughed at Seamus' stipulations. When Harry spared a smile for Hermione, it was to see her flushed before the sea of entertained attention but similarly amused. On her other side, grinning widely, Ron slung an arm around her shoulders to pull her in an energetic one-armed embrace. It stayed there even as the laughter eased.

The weaving walk back from the Great Hall to the Dragon's Nest seemed shorter in company, but in many ways a little less enjoyable. Harry didn't mind in this instance, the return feast and the atmosphere it created as much an obligation as school attendance itself, but he wouldn't be sad to be rid of the overwhelming company. After Christmas and the parties it entailed, the urge to take a break from theatrics and hype had grown increasingly. Another thing he'd realised about himself, right about the same time he'd learnt that the loudness and vibrancy of his dorm-mates was sometimes tiresome for more specific reasons than that they could be 'a bit rowdy'.

The loudness, the excitement, the feverish near-hysteria of realising that NEWTs were barely months away, and yes, that they would all have to study even harder – it was abrasive, even if it wasn't all bad. Harry even found himself agreeing with Seamus' sentiment; having a night off from study before diving headfirst back into it would be as savoured as a final gasp of air before dropping beneath tumultuous seas. Utterly necessary.

But he had other plans for that night. Plans that provided the welcome relief from the persisting hubbub that surrounded him.

Approaching the Dragon's Nest, feet scuffing up the stone steps towards the arching doorway with its metallic beast slumbering on the front, Harry glanced around himself. He skimmed over the familiar faces of the Patil twins, of Neville standing alongside Hannah in quiet yet enthusiastic conversation, of Terry and Michael arguing and Susan and Mandy sharing a laugh. He skipped over Seamus as he led the way into the tower, hauling Dean after him, then glanced over his shoulder towards the trickling tail end of their party. He frowned.

"How much do you want to bet that someone's bought booze?" Ron was asking, though Harry barely heard him.

It wasn't posed to anyone in particular, but Hermione was the one who replied. "That's a stupid bet. It's practically assured."

"Are you saying you're not up for it?"

"For the bet, or a drink?"

"What's this, you're actually humouring me? I was almost sure that you'd steer clear of anything even resembling a Spritz after what happened at Christmas."

"I didn't say I'd take you up on your offer if it really was one, Ron."

Ron laughed, leading her through the arched entrance, but Harry barely heard that either. Ducking away from his friends unnoticed, he slipped through the thin stream of students, shared a brief smile with Wayne, brushed by Su's shoulder, and picked up his pace as the majority of them fell away to leave only a handful interspersed in its wake.

Daphne bypassed him with a side-eyed glance. Theodore didn't seem to notice him at all. Millicent had already found one of her cats somewhere along the trip from the Hall, and was paying more attention to the fur ball purring in her arms than where she was walking. Only Pansy and Blaise, walking side by side and in muted conversation, remained to take up the rear.

Just the two of them.

They stopped talking long before Harry had reached them, and stopped walking at nearly the same time. Both adopted their usual blank-faced regard, as unemotional as ever, but Harry didn't really care. Not this time. Hermione still said on frequent occasion that she would prefer it if they were all kinder to one another, more forgiving, that they interacted more. The ex-Slytherins – for they still always felt such a way, even if the rest of the eighth years had largely brushed aside such labelling – continued to be on the left foot, standing just outside the rest of their year mates. It was a shame, but not unexpected.

Harry didn't care so much about that, either. Not right then. Glancing between them, he didn't even bother waiting for a disregarding comment or the vaguely cordial nod that they so often offered him.

"Where's Draco?" he asked.

Pansy blinked. Blaise eyed her sidelong. Harry only spared Blaise himself a momentary glance, focusing upon Pansy. If she knew about Draco's feelings then Blaise most likely did too, but she was the only one Harry was certain knew of his and Draco's arrangement. Their arrangement that hadn't felt quite so strange for a long time but abruptly seemed more than a little absurd – and a little obvious – when Harry viewed it through either hers or Draco's lens.

"He's not here," Pansy finally said.

"Yeah, I got that. But he was at the feast, so where'd he go?"

Pansy's lips pinched, the only shift in her expression. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because I want to talk to him."

"So?"

"So, you're the most likely person to know where he went. I didn't even see him leave, but I'll bet you did."

Pansy's lips pinched further. "What if he doesn't want to talk to you?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't really care, to be honest. I'll just talk, then, and he can listen whether he wants to or not."

Blaise snorted. As Pansy shot him a glare, the first real break in her blankness, Blaise rolled his eyes. A touch of the easy swagger Harry remembered he'd once had resurfaced. "You're really something, Potter, aren't you?"

Harry shrugged again. "I don't know. Maybe."

"Yeah, you are. Why else would Draco be interested, after all?"

So he did know. Harry wasn't even faintly surprised. "Where'd he go?"

"Zabini," Pansy said lowly.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Pans, he's going to find him anyway. There's not that many places Draco goes when he'd sulking."

"He's in the library?" Harry guessed.

Blaise smirked. "Bingo," he said with a wink.

Harry nodded. Skirting around the both of them, Harry started back down the passage they'd come, taking the steps two at a time. He only paused as Blaise called him to a halt a moment later. He glanced over his shoulder. "What?"

Blaise, turned after him and propped against the stone wall alongside him, considered him for a moment before replying. "He's in a particularly bad mood lately, just so you know. Tread carefully."

Harry nodded slowly, ignoring Pansy's sighing "shut the fuck up, Zabini, honestly". "You two spent the Christmas break with him, then?"

"With him?" Pansy rolled her eyes in direct contrast to Blaise's abruptly wide grin.

"Yeah, you could say that," he said. "Not much 'spending', though. He was 'studying'."

Blaise made quotations in the air to accompany his words before folding his arms across his chest. He smirked as he watched Harry consider his words.

"Right," he said, nodding shortly. "Thanks for the warning, I guess." Turning, Harry continued down the stairs. He didn't slow when Blaise called after him again, barely registering the amused "kick him out of his funk, would you, Potter."

* * *

The castle was silent but for the hum of wind passing down the passages, the murmur and groans of the walls as they settled for the evening. Any trace of students that had passed through it earlier that evening had vanished, and the stone corridors were empty of anything but flickering torchlight, the cool glow of the moon streaming through the windows, and the occasional ghost drifting in thoughtful solitude.

To the company of only his own footsteps, Harry slipped through that silence. It was a little jarring, if comfortably so, after the vibrancy of his fellow eighth years. He would hazard a guess that Draco had likely appreciated it in much the same way as he was. If nothing else, that isolation, the quietude it entailed, was something they shared. Something that Harry had realised was one of several commonalities. Commonalities and… liking?

Maybe. Just maybe.

The library doors were closed, but that didn't mean anything. Seniors were allowed within until ten o'clock anyway. Easing one side open, Harry slipped within, closed the door behind himself, and made his way almost blindly through the dark aisles. He exchanged only a glance with Madam Pince, nodded in recognition of her muttered rules that she seemed to regurgitate every time anyone visited her books, and trekked the familiar route towards the alcove he'd visited countless times before.

It was darker the deeper he went. Darker, briefly, and then lighter as the glow of a glass-bound lamp peeked around the aisles and through the lines of shelving. Pausing just beyond it, Harry peered into the pool of light that spilled over the table. The light that encompassed Draco in his ring of books and quills, inkwells and parchment sheets, that so often decorated the table in their study sessions. For once, Harry considered him with a new light that had nothing to do with the orange glow from the flickering candle.

Draco was handsome. Harry knew that. He'd always known it, even if that handsomeness had been tarnished by dislike that bordered upon hatred on frequent occasions. It was simply a fact about him, much as Harry could recognise that he was blond, or that his nose was a little too sharply pointed to be overlooked, or that he had long and surprisingly delicate fingers. Just facts, except when considered in the light of the words Draco had admitted before Christmas.

Now, Harry couldn't really see him any other way. The urge to step forwards, the assume their usual closeness that had been stripped away for barely two weeks, was a magnetic desire. How many times had Harry approached that study table, with Draco bowed over his books and scrawling line after line of elegant print? It was instinctive to want to follow that trend.

Instinctive… and a want. Harry wanted it. Whether for the comfort of touch, touching in a way that didn't feel quite the same with anyone else, or for another reason entirely, Harry wanted things to go back to the way they'd been. It wouldn't happen, couldn't, but then – paradoxically – Harry knew he didn't want that to happen at all. Because it would never be quite the same anyway.

Draco was sulking, Blaise had said. Whatever that meant. Would he even talk to Harry if he approached him, or would Harry simply have to speak to him without getting a reply, just as he'd told Pansy he would?

_There's only one way to find out, _an irritatingly rational voice muttered in his head. Though he shrugged it aside alongside his awkwardness, Harry steeled himself for what was to come and stepped into the lamp light.

Draco didn't lift his head. He didn't give any direct indication he noticed Harry. Except, watching him as Harry was, as familiar with his study habits as Harry had become, he knew that the slight slowing of his quill bespoke distraction. That it was just one nudge away from stopping entirely, from Draco speaking and reaching for Harry's textbook or essay and pointing something out, or commenting that it was getting late, or even admitting that he was getting tired as he'd done only twice before. It might not be Draco's undivided attention, but it was enough, and it fortified Harry's resolution further.

"Hey," he said, stopping at the edge of the table. "Seamus has made a decree, you know. No studying tonight, and that includes you. Even Hermione agreed, though not in so many words."

Draco didn't reply. His quill twitched but didn't otherwise pause.

"Draco?"

Nothing.

"Are you going to stay down here until Pince comes and kicks you out?"

Still nothing.

Biting back a sigh, Harry briefly closed his eyes before gathering his courage once more. Why was it that fighting, something he'd once done so well but now felt almost abhorrent to consider, was so much easier to throw himself into that a simple conversation and admission? Why was it possible to risk his own life but not to dodge the urge to save face and slink away from the humiliation of having any words and feelings voiced thrown back at him like a slap in the face?

Harry didn't know what he'd expected. He didn't know what he hoped for from Draco. Folding his arms tightly over his chest, fighting the urge to cling to himself, he took a breath before throwing himself headfirst into the deep end.

_Like a band-aid. Just do it quickly._

"I thought about what you said," Harry began slowly, and Draco's quill froze. "About what you told me, and how you felt. I thought about it a lot, actually. Practically all of Christmas."

Harry couldn't look at Draco. His gaze was fixed upon the parchment before him instead, where the nib of Draco's quill threatened to drip a droplet of ink. For the first time he appreciated just how hard it must have been for Draco to stumble through admitting his own feelings. Draco hadn't even been faced with the assurance that a positive reception lay at the other end.

Swallowing a lump in his throat, Harry licked his lips before continuing. "I'm not good at this sort of thing, you know. I've thought it for a while, but really, over Christmas, I've started to think that maybe there's a few screws loose or something. I don't know how to… I mean, I don't really know how to… to…"

"To what?"

Harry's eyes flicked from Draco's quill to his face. It hadn't shifted, hadn't risen, yet the corner of Draco's eye was visibly trained upon him. Harry felt his heartbeat give an anxious quiver, and his arms tightened over his chest just a little.

"This," he said. "Any of this. With you. I mean, really thinking about it, there must have been something wrong with me that I didn't even realise what was going on, right? Or that I didn't think it was weird – or, well, I did, but it wasn't enough for me to stop doing it. Clearly. I just – I don't know what I'm supposed to do, or say, or if I'm even doing anything right, so even though I told you we would talk after Christmas, I didn't think – I mean, I didn't know –"

"What the fuck are you going on about?"

Like a wind-up toy, Draco's switch flipped. He all but flung himself back in his seat, his quill flung from his grasp as his hands rose to his face. He scrubbed at his eyes, rubbed his cheeks, and exhaled harshly through his fingers. The motion was so abrupt, so contrasting to seconds before, that Harry was momentarily thrown. It wasn't a reassuring gesture, and definitely not when coupled with the sharpness of his words, but at least it was more than what he'd given Harry before. Blessedly more.

"This," Harry reattempted. "You. And me. And you liking me. And me… me probably liking you back."

Draco paused in his scrubbing. A brief pause, interrupted only by the tap of Harry's shoes on the ground as he rocked from foot to foot. Slowly, Draco's hands slid down his face. "What?"

"You," Harry said. "I think I probably like you."

"You… think you like me."

Harry's gaze dropped down to his feet as he butted a toe against the table leg. "Yeah. I don't really know how to say it, but –"

"You don't know how to say it."

Harry frowned. "Look, this has never happened to me before, okay? The only other people I've dated have been the other way around."

"Meaning –?"

"Meaning I was the one who liked them first."

"Oh, I doubt that. Ginny Weasley has been a basket case for years. You were just too blind to see it."

The urge to snap a retort in Ginny's defence rose on Harry's tongue, but as he glanced up at Draco, it died before it had properly formed. Draco was staring at him, eyes just a little widened, one of his hands still raised before his mouth as though he'd forgotten he held it there. There was no malice in his expression, in his tone. No derision. If anything, he looked a little stunned.

It wasn't much, but it was enough. Enough that Harry could gather himself once more. Being the only one disconcerted made it so much harder, but when it was the both of them?

Stepping up to Draco's chair, Harry turned his gaze properly upon him. It was strange to be positioned that much higher than him, above him, with Draco's face upturned and as splintered and open as a shattered window. Strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. How many times had Harry sat in his lap, glanced at his face sidelong, clambered over him and off of him with increasing ease and casualness?

"I'm not good at this," Harry said quietly. "At any kind of dating, for that matter, even if I have done it before. This is – different. For me. I don't really know how it's supposed to work, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do, or say, or think. So you're going to have to throw me a bone a little bit, okay."

When Draco didn't reply, Harry slowly, hesitantly, lowered his hand to Draco's shoulder until his fingers just brushed the material of his robes. "I like you," he said, a little more confidently this time. "I like being around you."

"That's not the quite the same thing as my liking," Draco murmured, though he still hadn't blinked away from his wide-eyed staring.

"I'm not so sure about that," Harry said. He took a moment to bite his lip, to consider if _this _was it, and _this _was what he really wanted, even if he didn't wholly understand what _this_ was. Even if he likely never would have realised another was going on at all if Draco hadn't planted the idea first. Then, raising his other hand to Draco's chin, he leant over him to touch his lips in the lightest of kisses.

For a moment, Draco didn't move. He was nothing but frozen, as though magically petrified. And yet, just as Harry began to pull away, he shifted. His hand rose to the back of Harry's head, touched then tentatively settled, and he pulled Harry back towards him until their lips were pressed fast.

Warm. Soft. Comfortable, yet not without its tingle of something else. Something other. Something that touches and comfort didn't always entail, and something that Harry didn't feel anymore in a hug from Ginny, or in Ron's butted shoulder and Hermione's affectionate pats as she left him in to common room to retire to bed for the night. It was something that had flickered to life only slowly, evolving and growing bigger and brighter entirely unnoticed until Harry regarded it in just the right lighting.

_Oh, _a quiet, faintly wondering part of him thought. _So that's what it was._

Eyes closing, Harry sunk against Draco, opening his mouth to his warm kisses. His hand settled more firmly on Draco's shoulder, his other curling around Draco's neck, and with less hesitancy, Draco returned the touches.

A hand drifted around Harry's back, around his waist, and fingers hooked into the back of his shirt. _Oh, and that, too. _A breath of even more familiarity, the hold recognised and remembered but seen in a different light.

Draco twisted in his seat, the chair scraping as he turned, and, lost in Draco's mouth and the kiss of his breath across his lips, Harry barely noticed until Draco tugged him down towards himself. Harry's body reacted instinctively, moved to straddle Draco just as his arms draped over his shoulders, and pressed a little more closely to him until they sat chest to chest. _Oh, I think I see what Pansy was thinking now._

Soft touches that tightened until they were practically clinging. Gentle, almost awed kisses that became heavier, thicker, wet and a mess of tongue and sucking lips. Harry had kissed people before, had shared many kisses, and yet this felt somehow different. The experience lay on a bed of routine, of habitual contact, and played practiced chords while somehow producing a tune that sounded entirely different.

Different and better.

Gasping, short of breath and warmer than he had any right to be in the darker reaches of the library, Harry couldn't have said how long it had been when he surfaced from fierce kisses for a gulp of air. So close to Draco that he could taste every exhalation Draco huffed, that he could feel the warmth of him emanating from his skin, Harry slowly opened his eyes.

Close. So close, and closer than ever before, with Harry's arms looped around Draco's neck, his legs bent and flush alongside Draco's thighs, Draco's own arms holding them together so tightly that Harry could feel the heaviness of each breath as it shuddered through Draco's chest. So wonderfully close.

Draco's eyes were heavy lidded as they too blinked open to peer up at him. Slightly dazed, a little disbelieving, but bright with a light that stretch incomparably beyond what the lamp upon the table could illuminate. Pretty eyes, even little more than a dark, formless gaze that met Harry's own with renewed steadiness.

"That's a good thing, I take it?" Harry murmured. They were so close he barely had to whisper.

Draco's amused huff brushed against Harry's neck as he leant forward, forehead dropping to rest on Harry's shoulder. "If you're being an asshole and pretending –"

"I'm not," Harry said.

A pause, then, "If this is some mean-spirited prank –"

"It isn't." Acting on instinct, Harry grazed his lips over the shell of Draco's ear. He couldn't help but smile as Draco shivered slightly. That close, Harry felt it through every part of his body.

Not even a flicker of embarrassment remained, swept aside in the wake of his dazed aftermath. His breath was still were heavy, his lips a little sore not unfamiliarly so yet still somehow different to the effect of Ginny's kisses. His body felt heavy too, blissfully relaxed and comfortable in a way he hadn't felt for weeks. Not since Draco had last given him the benefit of his lap. It felt like a long time ago since Pansy had walked in on them, since Harry had been left stupefied in Draco's wake as he swept from the alcove in a fit of mortification.

Dropping his chin down onto Draco's own shoulder, Harry murmured a contented, "I take it this means that you'll let me sit with you again?"

Draco snorted, the sound muffled but distinct nonetheless. "I knew you only used me for one thing."

"Two, now." As Draco twisted his head, turning slightly to face him, Harry smirked. "You're a pretty good kisser, too."

"Oh." A moment of his own stupefied silence followed before Draco straightened, leaning back in his seat. "Well, there's always room for improvement."

Lifting his own head, peering down at Draco once more, Harry smiled. "Looking forward to it."

"Between study, maybe."

"Of course." Harry rolled his eyes. "You know, I'm not even surprised. I've always been aware of your priorities. Speaking of, did you actually eat anything at the feast?"

"Just as I know what your priorities are. And yes, I did."

"Good, because I'd definitely have to go in search of a house elf otherwise. Especially if you really do plan to keep studying."

Draco's arms tightened around Harry and Harry couldn't help but grin. He couldn't seem to shake it for long, it seemed; with his nervousness swept aside, only delight seemed to lie in its wake. "I'd rather you didn't."

"Yeah, I got that impression."

"I'd rather just stay here for the rest of the night, for that matter."

Cocking his head, Harry regarded him curiously. "Do you really get as much out of this whole seating arrangement as me? I was sure you were only humouring me for most of it."

Draco laughed. The sound was a little exasperated, a little breathless, and felt infinitely better to Harry's ears than the detached, flat words he'd voiced in their brief period of separation. As did the way Draco tightened his arms even further and returned his forehead to Harry's shoulder.

"Harry, you have no idea."

Harry didn't slow as he stepped into the alcove. Dropping his books upon the table, his bag to the floor alongside it, he thrust a kebab in Draco's face to the satisfying, annoyed grunt of his subject.

"Here," he said, shaking it slightly. "Eat it."

Draco sat up from his textbook. He lowered his quill, frowned at the wrap with lips drawing to the side, before plucking it from Harry's hand. At the same time, he reached his other hand towards him, hooking his arm around Harry's waist and pulling him towards him.

Harry readily followed his silent suggestion. It was too easy to fall into Draco's lap. Too easy to lean against him, to soak up the warmth of his presence. Far too easy to press himself up against him, to wrap his arms around him in return and graze a kiss over Draco's neck. As with so many things between them, in such a short time what had seemed so ludicrously impossible became utterly natural. Harry withheld from obliging to that last with only a brief struggle.

"I did have breakfast, you know," Draco said before taking a bite.

"I know." Harry reached for his Defence textbook. In the face of a struggling capacity for practical skills, he found himself turning towards the theoretical aspects of the subject more and more often. God help him, he'd need any extra boost he could get to pass his NEWTs at the rate he was going. "It's past lunchtime, though."

"Most boyfriends don't simultaneously assume the role of caretaker, you know."

"Yeah, I know that, too." Harry flipped open his book. "But most people don't have a hermit for a boyfriend who would probably starve to death if he wasn't either dragged from his study hole or hand-delivered food."

"That's very specific of you."

"You require very specific treatment, Draco."

"Duly noted."

Harry smiled. He wasn't oblivious to the ring of satisfaction that touched Draco's words. The tinge of affection, even. It wasn't so hard to hear when he knew what he was listening out for. Settling into what would surely have to be the most comfortable seat in the world, Harry turned to his own studies. If nothing else, Draco's habits had rubbed off on him at least as much as Harry's had in return. A little pathetically, given their circumstances and all that such studiousness entailed, Harry found he didn't mind studying anymore in the least.


	10. Chapter 10

WARNING: this chapter contains descriptions of sexually explicit nature. If you don't like that kind of thing, probably best not to read it, at least until the page break.

* * *

**Chapter 10**

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

Harry swallowed, but he didn't hesitate in nodding. He needed this. They both did. It had been a hell of a few weeks, with classes building upon themselves to a manic degree. Harry was understanding for the first time why NEWT students were permitted extended hours in the library; they bloody well needed it.

Exams were still a handful of weeks away, but his headache was a near-constant companion, the buzzing reminder in his ear that he had this essay to write, that chapter to read, or those notes to go over once more and to complete properly this time. Harry didn't know what he'd do without the support of his surprisingly compassionate professors, or the mutual suffering of his friends.

And Draco. He had no idea where he'd be if it wasn't for Draco.

It wasn't only that Draco was an incredibly efficient studier. Not only that he had a wealth of intelligence that Harry had never recognised nor appreciated in the past, either. It wasn't only that he kept Harry company when he sought an escape from the murmuring voices of his friends and classmates alike, an escape that fled from crowds but paradoxically sought companionship nonetheless. Draco provided that company and it was never intrusive. Never too much or not enough.

It wasn't even that, when they were alone together, Harry always sat in Draco's lap. Not that the questions he asked to himself more than Draco were always answered. Not that, when frustration brewed, when his headache became too much, or when the begging internal whimpers for a break became too much to ignore, he could turn to Draco for a kiss, or a touch, or to simply lean against him and soak up the warmth of his closeness. That closeness had taken on a new meaning since Christmas, an extra layer, but it didn't detract from the benefits it had once provided. Quite the opposite, rather.

Instead of being any single part of that, it was everything as a whole. Everything about Draco had become such a rock of support, such a pillar of stability, that Harry didn't know what he'd do without him over the weeks and months building up to the NEWTs. Maybe he was leaning on Draco too much. Maybe he was growing to reply upon the consistency of their touches, the comfort of kisses that felt different to those he'd shared with Cho, with Ginny. Maybe Harry should caution himself against sinking too deeply, should look to other outlets for recovery and support just as Madam Pomfrey and the Ministry Healer reps had suggested.

But he didn't want to. Draco was all Harry needed right now. Yet, somehow, Draco still seemed to question that need. Just as he questioned Harry's commitment to taking it a step further.

"I'm not going to back out now," he said, shifting in Draco's lap. "Do you know how much preparation it takes? It's crazy."

"I do, actually," Draco said. "I read about it, too."

"I'd bloody well hope you did, seeing as you were the one who suggested the book to me in the first place."

"It wasn't a suggestion in itself."

"I know it wasn't."

"I wasn't insinuating that –"

"Draco, I know." Harry cut him off, resting a hand flat upon his chest, fingers splayed. It was strange seeing Draco in such a state. Not his nervousness, which Harry realised only then he was able to detect when he previously hadn't been able to. Not his concern, either, which was also a little bit new, if not as much. Lying flat on his back, the smooth lines of his bed still tucked neatly around him, was entirely different to how Harry usually sat with him. On him. The absence of clothes was new, too.

It wasn't the first time they'd shared a bed. What had become a habit of sharing Draco's seat directly had evolved into sharing a mattress, sharing space, sharing the protective cocoon of the canopy curtains and their Silencing Charm that no one else in the dormitory seemed to make use of anymore. But this was different. Very different

Draco's pale cheeks were slightly flushed. He was breathing slowly, but there was a deliberateness to each breath, as though he were counting the seconds of his inhalation. His hands where they rested on Harry's straddling thighs fluctuated between grasping just enough to be distinctly felt before loosening into an almost caressing hold. He didn't look away from Harry once, hadn't since Harry had slipped between the curtains of his bed barely minutes before.

Harry had never been properly self-conscious – or at least he didn't think he'd been. Hindsight, as he'd discovered only in the past few months, was an interesting thing. Sharing showers and changerooms, getting dressed alongside the other boys – or not, as Harry belatedly realised. He'd rarely shared an open dressing space with his dormmates, and he'd always waited until the shower room was empty before entering himself. It had been natural. Automatic. He hadn't even thought about it, and definitely not with undertones of disgust the likes that Dudley's teasing or Uncle Vernon's blatant homophobia would have exhibited. But it was uncomfortable, he realised. Unnerving to be seen in such a way.

It was still uncomfortable when Draco stared at him that first time several weeks before, climbing into the bed alongside him naked as Draco was himself. Still unnerving. But it was a little easier now, and Harry fought the urge to withdraw from sight, to shrink from Draco's gaze and hasten to cover himself beneath the sheets as was proper. As he should. Harry didn't see anything all that wrong with his own body – it was just a body, after all; always a little thin, once scrawny but less so these days – but to be stared at with such attentiveness? With a hint of hunger, even?

Harry had never felt that before. He'd never stared at Cho and fought the urge to undress her with his eyes. His appreciation had always been for the pretty dress robes she'd been wearing, or her pretty smile, or the fierce expression she wore when flying in quidditch. The same with Ginny; a different kind of pretty but still beautiful, he'd admired the way her own smile encompassed her whole being, how her nose scrunched slightly when she laughed, skewing the freckles splattered over it, or how her energy oozed from every line of her lean body, so enthusiastic and present.

Draco was different. Even as Harry accepted his own discomfort for being stared at, he couldn't quite stop himself from staring in return. Draco's chest was smooth and as pale as the rest of him, the lines of his abdomen hard, the curve of his arms, his biceps as they flexed each time his hands grasped Harry's legs, drawing his gaze each time. It was a different kind of beautiful again, and Harry didn't need to actively begin stripping Draco's clothes as he'd never properly had the urge to with either Cho or Ginny. It was all there before him, expectant and telling, impossible to ignore.

Just as Draco's arousal was all too apparent. That in itself wasn't foreign; whether Draco had only allowed it of himself since Harry had verbally returned his feelings or for some other reason entirely, sitting in Draco's lap had the unfortunate – or perhaps fortunate – side effect of knowing just when his thoughts drifted. Harry didn't find it anywhere near as alarming as he had the first time he'd noticed, though it was a novel experience once more to have it so close. So direct. To feel his warmth and hardness as skin upon skin, and –

Harry swallowed again. He knew his own cheeks were flushed, and likely even more than Draco's. Was he nervous? Undoubtedly. But he intended to go through with their plans for that night nonetheless. That was, unless, "Do you want me to stop?"

Draco shook his head just as quickly as Harry had previously nodded. "No," he said, his voice a little hoarse. "No, I don't want you to – to stop."

Harry nodded again. "Good. That's good, then." Taking a slow breath, ignoring that it shook slightly, Harry glanced to the nightstand alongside Draco's bed. "Would you like to cast the charm, or should I?"

"I'll do it." Draco reached for his wand without shifting his gaze from Harry even slightly. As he did, his other hand slid along Harry's thigh until it was cupping his arse with that same, slightly grasping hold. Harry bit back a shiver. They were doing it. They were actually going to go through with this. All those talks in third and fourth year from long-suffering Heads of Houses, all the clinical precautioning of diseases and 'safe sex' from a surprisingly proficient Madam Pomfrey, seemed so removed from the real thing. Even the past half an hour Harry had spent in the bathroom, putting into dubious practice the once-confounding yet now entirely reasonable descriptions he'd read, felt somehow distant.

Draco's voice was still hoarse when he uttered the charm, briefly removing his hand from Harry's arse to replace a moment later. Lukewarm slickness, a smooth wetness, coated his hand, and Harry couldn't withhold his shiver this time when Draco inched his fingers further. His breath caught as those fingers pressed against him, pressed into him, where his own had been only minutes before.

"Fucking hell," Draco whispered. His cheeks had flushed slightly more than they had been before, and Harry locked onto that as a reprieve from his own embarrassment, from the heat flaring in his own cheeks. "Fucking…"

"Are you going to sit there swearing all day or do you really want me to be the one to do it?" Harry's voice was short of breath, wavering and thinner than he'd expected. He huffed a slightly strangled laugh, curling his fingers against Draco's chest directly above the pounding heartbeat. "I don't actually know what I'm doing any more than you, but –"

"But you decided to go about it this way?" Draco asked, slowly and almost hesitantly extracting his fingers.

"I spend half my time in your lap these days, Draco," Harry said. "It seemed kind of poetic."

"What, so you're a poet now? I'd never have thought it of you given how adamantly you've avoided books for most of your school career."

"Are you belittling me? Seriously? Now?"

"I –"

"Or is this an outlet for you losing your shit?"

"Yes," Draco said, far quicker than Harry had thought possibly of him. He so rarely admitted any form of weakness. "Definitely the latter."

Harry laughed again. Who knew that there was such a way to undermine Draco's near constant aloofness and sarcasm? Chin tucking briefly, he closed his eyes, shook his head, then glanced over his shoulder and down his own back. Bolstered by Draco's admission, and far more confidently than he felt, he reached behind himself and manoeuvred Draco's hand with his own. Draco's breath audibly caught as he wrapped their joined fingers around his heavy hardness.

"Okay?" Harry asked, turning back towards Draco.

Draco nodded.

"Okay. That's good, because… because… yeah. Okay." Words had never been Harry's strong point. He was better at simply acting. So, instead of wading through their awkwardness with blind stuttering, he let his actions speak for him.

Draco's hand was all but immobile in his own, but that was okay. Harry guided his arousal towards him, easing himself backwards at the same time. His own breath caught at the moment they touched, but he forced himself to relax, to inhale – _just relax, just like the book said _– and sank back onto Draco.

It was tight. A brief moment of painful. Foreign and not at all like his own fingers. A muted sound uttered from Draco, but Harry barely heard him. His ears were deafened with his own rapid heartbeat, with his deliberately slow breaths that repeated _relax… slowly…_ with every inhalation, and his mind filled with the sensation of Draco's hardness easing into him. Strange, unfamiliar, a little uncomfortable and a little of what wasn't quite painfulness – but not bad. Not as he'd feared. Not as he didn't allow himself to admit he'd worried.

Closing his eyes, Harry focused upon seating himself onto Draco. Upon easing himself, relaxing, taking him in, on doing _this_ and smothering the giddy mental chants of _fucking hell, we're really doing this_. His hands splayed on Draco's chest, steadying himself as he moved gradually, steadily. Only when he sat fully upon his knees, fully upon Draco's lap once more, could he allow himself to catch his breath properly and really, properly think.

_Shit_, was about all that made intelligible sense. _Holy shit, we're really… and he's really…._

"Merlin," Draco gasped. When Harry managed to open his eyes, it was to meet Draco's own, wide and staring at him with a dazed kind of rapture. "You're… you're…"

"Doing my best," Harry said, managing a smile that felt more than a little shy. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been properly bashful. "Bear with me."

Draco slipped a hand from where he'd returned to grasping Harry's thighs. He dropped it instead atop Harry's own, squeezing his fingers in a convulsive grasp atop his chest. "You feel so – so –"

"Good? I bloody well hope so, 'cause otherwise I'm definitely doing something wrong."

Draco uttered a strangled laugh of his own. "Do you always have to try and kill the mood, or are you just nervous as hell?"

"The latter," Harry said immediately. "Definitely the latter."

Unexpectedly, Draco's smile froze. His cheeks were still flushed, his eyes a little glassy, and Harry was all too aware of the tension thrumming through him, of his arousal and the heat within his gut that seemed to throb and grow with each given moment. All too aware of the weight and feel of Draco inside him, the hotness, the tightness that wasn't painful anymore. Yet Draco's smile faded with an unexpected calmness, and when he raised one of Harry's hands to his lips, kissing his knuckles, there was a gentleness in the touch that jarringly contrasted his usual abrasive turn-a-phrase. He lowered their hands back to his chest just as gently before refastening his hold upon Harry's legs.

"Tell me to stop if it's too much," he said, and waited long enough for Harry's nod. Then he began to move.

Slow at first. Erratic and unsure. A tense little jerk of hips, an awkward buck, each motion rolling into Harry with a solid force that had his breath tightening and his hands clutching at Draco's chest for nothing if not to steady himself. Foreign and unfamiliar it might be, tight and almost uncomfortable, but it wasn't bad. Not in the least. Rather, with each jerk, each push of warmth and reaffirmation of closeness, Harry felt it grow… better. _More_.

Closing his eyes, he sank back onto Draco, moving his hips with each thrust that gradually smoothed, gradually fell into a rhythm that became increasingly easier to bear. His hand unerringly sought his own arousal, and in time with Draco's thrusts, with his own rocking motions, he jerked himself off to the heart-throbbing beat of pleasure.

Sharp heat. Heady tightness. A coiled tension built in his gut, and the flush of warmth that suffused him seemed to trickle down ever limb, into every extremity. Draco's gasping breathes, the stuttered groans that arose from him every other moment as if unbidden, met Harry's own as they moved faster and easier. Pleasure thrumming through Harry built in the backs of his eyelids, a direct line between his brain and his groin, his pumping fist that twitched with a mind of its own in an increasingly desperate bid for release.

Hot and tight, constant and increasingly hurried. Harry fell into the stuttering rhythm, of sinking onto Draco with hitching jerks, until Draco shifted both of his hands around to his arse and adjusted himself just slightly. A spark of renewed pleasure, a different kind, skittered like a lightshow off the inside of his eyelids. Once, twice, again. He couldn't withhold the strangled moan the fell from his lips, his hand convulsing to match Draco's thrusts and chase it, chase the mounting pleasure as it climbed and climbed and…

In an shaking burst he found himself coming in a thick, warm rush into the fist of his hand. A desperate cry spilled forth unbidden, and he wouldn't have cared if the Silencing Charms around Draco's bed had abruptly failed. He wouldn't have cared in the least; not before that all-consuming, euphoric pleasure.

Never before. Never like that.

His jerking hips and riding motion had abruptly stopped, but though Harry swam through a haze of pleasure, he was all too aware of Draco still thrusting beneath him with increasingly erratic jerks. Thrusts that pushed into him, grazing across the quivering mass of sensations and sparking them alight in an almost painful clamour. Steadying himself with one hand on Draco's chest, gasping in a desperate bid for breath that seemed to have abandoned him, Harry opened his eyes to the sight of Draco's flushed face, his eyes still open and fixed upon Harry's but expression wrought in a mask of his own pleasure that Harry had never seen before but knew instinctively. Even through the buffeting aftermath of orgasm, the stuttering hitch of his heartbeat and the unexpected heaviness of his limbs, Harry reasserted himself enough to push back further onto Draco just a little more, to push him just enough.

Draco's groan as he came rivalled Harry's own. Arms shaking as they propped him up from Draco's chest, Harry blinked through his dazedness, through the disconcerting feeling of Draco's release within him. His thighs trembled too, holding himself steady just enough for Draco to ride out the waves of his pleasure with spasming jerks. Only when Draco's hips stilled did Harry all but collapse back onto his haunches, dizzy and slightly disoriented yet filled with an airy detachedness and disbelief that he'd never felt before.

The pleasure, that unique kind of closeness, and what it could achieve – he'd never had thought it could be like that.

"Are – are you alright?"

Draco's question was more of a gasp, breathy and barely audible. Raising his heavy head, pushing himself upright a little more, Harry met Draco stare for stare. He'd never been good with words, but in this instance he didn't think he needed to be. The smile that he couldn't suppress was heartfelt and more than a little awed. When he managed to climb off of Draco, awkward and wavering on his awkward and wavering knees, it stung a little, felt a little discomfortingly slick and empty as Draco slid out of him, but that hardly mattered. Not when, as Harry all but crawled his way towards Draco and dropped a swooping kiss upon him, Draco clutched him against him with a fervour and intensity that chased away any possible concerns he might have.

"Never better."

* * *

"What time is it?"

Harry didn't really care, but he asked anyway. It could have been breaking dawn, the sun crawling through the window to seep through the shadows and chase them away, hauling the eighth year boys awake, and it wouldn't have mattered. Harry didn't really care what anyone would say, what anyone would think, of him and Draco sharing a bed. Not even Ron. Not right then.

Draco shifted beneath him. Harry suspected he reached for his nightstand, then was sure of it when the faint glow of a _Lumos_ charm spilled over his shoulder, not quite touching his eyes but radiant nonetheless. It blurred against the edges of his already blurry vision, his eyes free of glasses as they had been for hours. Hours of sleeplessness that was by no means reluctant and gruelling this time.

They didn't speak much. Oftentimes, and lately more frequently, they did and not only of study. But not this time. Harry was content to lie atop Draco, his arms wrapped around him, their legs linked and as close as humanly possible without bridging that gap of utter closeness. That it had been bridged at all still felt faintly surreal, but in an increasingly wonderful way. Less passionate, less fierce and intense than it had been, but definitely wonderful.

Harry liked to touch Draco. He liked the closeness, liked the feeling of warm proximity, and it didn't feel like a strange desire anymore. More than that, though, he discovered he needed it as he'd never realised before. He needed to be close, and needed to be close to Draco even more so. What had been the simple use of a body, of someone for comfort and support, had become a real and specific desire and necessity.

Was it a crush? A fancy? A lustfulness that had manifested without Harry's initial realisation or consent? He didn't know, but he didn't really care. Much as every problematic thought that arose in his mind that night, he couldn't be bothered to cling to it long enough or aggressively enough to stop it from slipping away. Holding was Draco was about all that felt important.

His warm chest rose and fell, pushing against Harry's own.

The lines of muscle in his back were loose but still dense, distinct enough that Harry's fingers had something to cling to.

The hold of his legs, intertwined with Harry's, were locked not tightly but just as firmly as Draco's arms had been wrapped around Harry's shoulders until moments before. Until he'd released him to –

"Nearly three o'clock," Draco said.

"Hm?" Harry had all but forgotten what he'd asked. He didn't really care, after all.

"We've still got a couple of hours until morning."

"Oh." Harry blinked lazily. "That's good, then."

"Are you going to go to sleep at all?"

"I –" Harry paused, thought about it, then shook his head against Draco's shoulder. "No, I don't think I can. You're more than welcome to, though. Don't let me keep you up."

"Was that a pun?"

Harry grinned. He peered up at Draco with just his eyes, his peripheral view affording him just enough of a glance of his face to glimpse the smirk playing across the corners of his lips. "Not intentional, but I see your point."

"Do you?"

Draco wasn't quite aroused just at that moment, not completely, but the suggestion was there enough for Harry to feel it. He didn't know if either of them would act upon it, even if the desire for that particular passing thought was certainly stronger than every other one that preceded it.

Shifting, conscious of his own slight arousal, Harry pressed his lips against the boniness of Draco's shoulder. "I guess this sort of adds a different dynamic to the situation."

"To what situation?" Draco asked, readjusting his arms around Harry.

"Me and you. Me sitting on your lap, I mean."

"You say that like it's a novel perspective, but I can assure you it isn't."

Lifting his head from Draco's shoulder, Harry regarded him fully. The light of Draco's muted _Lumos_ was bright enough for Harry to see the blurry lines of Draco's face. Enough to know that, though Draco was teasing him just a little, there was a degree of sincerity to his words, too.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked, almost warily.

"If you think about it, I'm sure you'll work it out," Draco replied.

"Draco."

"Harry."

Harry sighed. Frowning, pursing his lips, he thought. It really didn't take much consideration because, really, though it hadn't been foremost in his own thoughts, if it had been for Draco… "You mean that, pretty much since I first sat in your lap, you've been turned on by it?"

"Well, not all the time –"

"Draco."

This time, it was Draco's turn to sigh. Raising a hand to his face, he pinched the bridge of his nose in a way that, historically, Harry had always taken as a sigh of ridiculing exasperation. Now, it seemed far more indicative of exasperated embarrassment. "You're only just realising this now? I thought that when you belatedly realised I liked you in the first place –"

"Which wasn't even my own realisation," Harry interrupted. "Pansy practically spelled it out, then you told me yourself."

Draco's hand almost flattened over his face, covering most of it. "You really didn't know." It was less of a question than a bland statement of fact.

"Really," Harry said. Shuffling slightly on top of Draco, he adjusted himself so that he could rest his chin upon Draco's chest, his arms still wrapped around him. "So, do you?"

For a stretching pause, Draco remained hidden behind his hand. When he lowered it, he dropped it atop Harry's head in a feeble cuff that carried more affection than annoyance. "Yes, you idiot. So, no, it won't really change anything. Fundamentally, at least, though there'll be more than my own fantastical constructs to serve as food for thought."

Draco always did speak with an increasingly pompous turn-a-phrase when he became uncomfortable. It was kind of cute, and more than a little amusing. "For you, maybe not. It definitely changes things for me." Harry paused, thought, then pursed his lips again. "And other things."

Draco peered down at him, eyeing him with a slight frown even as his hand began a gentle caress through Harry's hair. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning," Harry drew his gaze briefly sidelong in the direction he knew Blaise Zabini's bed lay, "I'm thinking about our friends. And about them not knowing."

Draco's frown deepened a little more, though his hand still gently grazed along Harry's scalp. "About your friends not knowing, you mean."

"Did you tell Blaise as well as Pansy?"

"I didn't tell either of them anything," Draco said. "They're just cluey enough to pick up on what is apparently blatantly apparent to anyone I spend time with."

"Everyone but me," Harry muttered.

"Yes, but you're blissfully unaware to most of what shouts loudly in your face, Harry."

Harry pinched his back gently, but Draco continued to smirk even as he flinched slightly. Harry couldn't help but smile in return, which in turn drew a smile from Draco. He'd noticed that Draco often followed suit; it was as though it was reactive.

"I'd like to tell them," Harry said after a moment. "Ron and Hermione, at least. And Ginny."

Draco's smile slowly died. "Really?"

Harry nodded.

"You don't think Weasley –" He flinched again as Harry stabbed a finger in his back. "Fine. _Ron_. You don't think he in particular would have a problem with this? I'm honestly still astounded some days that you've managed to overcome the past. I don't think Ron would do the same quite so easily, especially with the hatred between our families."

"You managed to," Harry murmured, but he took a moment to turn Draco's words over. What Draco posed was a likely possibility given the precedent, but then, Draco hadn't been there at Christmas at the Burrow. He hadn't listened to Ron's words and felt the weight of them, encouraging and accepting. Ron had surprised him in the past, if not quite on this exact subject. Why should it be so impossible for him to do so again?

"I think he'll be fine," Harry finally said. "And if he isn't, I'll work it out somehow."

"You have a lot of confidence in him," Draco said.

"Of course I do. He's my best friend."

Draco only grunted, the sound felt as a vibration through his chest as much as heard. Harry stared up at him, eyeing his persistent frown. He had the sudden urge to wipe it away with a his thumb.

"Draco?" he prodded.

"Not yet," Draco replied, slowly. "Just... not yet."

"If not yet, then…?"

"After exams, maybe. With everyone being as stressed as they are, I can't imagine the atmosphere would be conducive to open-mindedness. Maybe directly in the aftermath, when the entirety of our grade is riding on a euphoric, liberated high."

Harry found himself smiling before Draco had even finished speaking. Pushing himself onto all fours, he crawled his way up Draco's body until he was hovering above him, leaning down to capture Draco's lips as he caught his attention.

"You mean it?" he murmured against Draco's mouth, hands rising to cup the sides of Draco's head. "You'd actually be okay with that?"

"Harry, I was happy to have you passing out drunk in my lap before you even had the faintest notion of considering caring for me in return," Draco replied, his own hand returning to threading through Harry's hair. "I think I've managed the worst of it."

Harry's smile became a full grin, and he dove in for a crushing kiss once more. When Draco leant up towards him, pushing his mouth against Harry's own and parting his lips to suck him in with thirsty desire, Harry sunk to meet him. Only when he managed to claw his way free for a momentary breather did he speak again.

"You know," he said, his face so close to Draco's that their noses brushed, that he barely needed to whisper, "we've still got three hours to morning, apparently."

Draco didn't need any more suggestion than that, and Harry let himself be pulled down flush against him with nothing but utter agreeability. It was looking to be about the best sleepless night Harry had ever had.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

Harry stared down at his wand.

Eleven inches. Holly wood. The phoenix feather core unseen but felt. Harry knew the statistics of his wand like Ollivander had told him only yesterday, knew them as much as he knew the exact shade of the wood, the line of darker grain that threaded its length, the slight impression where his thumb and forefinger always sat.

Or used to sit. Harry so rarely picked up his wand with the intention of using it these days. For a moment, staring down at where it lay untouched before him, he couldn't quite remember when he'd last used it at all.

_How scary, _he thought, almost shivering at the foreboding that settled a little more heavily in his gut. _To think that I hardly even properly practice magic anymore. _It was a different kind of fear to any Harry had experienced before. A sort of listless, resigned horror, a helplessness that he couldn't change what was already happening.

Harry had never been helpless in such a way before. He'd never let himself stop, never lain down and taken the hand that was dealt for him rather than fight it to the brink. But things changed. And besides, this was different. Horribly different. Impossible to face with brute force.

Couple that with exam fever, and Harry was left suspended in a particularly sorry mood. The feeling was rife throughout the seventh and eighth years, building increasingly in the weeks approaching the NEWTs. That night, the night before the first of the examinations, the Dragon's Nest was humming with it. Even at nearly eleven o'clock when most of them had forced themselves to seek their beds, it was as though the walls still quivered with unease.

Harry had never experienced exam pressure before. Not like this. There had been the OWLs, but in the grand scheme of things, alongside everything else that had befallen him in his fifth year it had seemed comparatively negligible. Now, with no madman thirsting after his blood, no villainous toad peering over his shoulder for any slip in his step that she could abuse to throw him further off-balance, it hit him hard. Harder.

Or it could have been because the war.

Or that he had actually bothered to study this time.

Or that, on just the other side of the exams, exams that had such potential for being disastrous, there was… nothing. A whole world of nothing.

The future. After. Harry had never considered so far ahead before. Even in his fourth year, when Moody's imposter had first posed the idea of becoming an auror to him, it had only ever been a distant possibility. Something to come. Something to drift towards but not quite to actively pursue just yet.

Now was different, and even more different because Harry wouldn't become an auror. Not anymore. He didn't think he could.

Across from him, the cover of a book _thunk_-ed shut. Harry started, wrenched from his thoughts, and glanced up to see Hermione slump back in her seat, rubbing her eyes. At her side, Ron sprawled across the table with heavy-lidded eyes but his quill still clutched in his hand. Last-minute cramming had always been his and Harry's style, but there was a distinct flavour of urgency to Ron's commitment that hadn't been there before. Whether it was driven by Hermione's influence – or Ron's enhanced consideration for Hermione's influence – or a real fear for the future, Harry didn't know. He supposed it didn't really matter. Ron still mentioned his intentions for entering the aurorship program, and for all Harry knew he was more than capable of pursuing that path.

Not like Harry. Ron didn't practice quite as much magic anymore either, but he wasn't like Harry.

"We should go to bed," Hermione said, dropping her hands from her face with a sigh. "It's getting late."

Harry didn't reply, gaze falling back to his wand, but Ron grunted and pushed himself upright. Nodding heavily, he smothered a yawn as he began to flip his own books closed, stacking his parchment pages on top of them. "Yep. Right. Good thinking."

"Harry?"

Harry glanced up at Hermione again, blinked detachedly as he met her gaze and rifled for what she'd asked of him, and shook his head slightly. "I'm fine."

"Harry –"

"I might just stick around a little bit longer. I haven't really gotten anything done all night."

Hermione frowned, her forehead wrinkling along familiar lines, but it was Ron who replied. "You know, last minute cramming is good and all, helps you feel better, but it doesn't actually do anything. Right, Hermione?"

Hermione nodded, but Harry only shrugged. "Yeah, well. Whatever."

"Sleep would do the most good," Hermione said quietly. "For all of us."

Harry stared at her pointedly, and she sighed. They all knew that, at least in the dormitories, Harry rarely slept anymore. There were very few instances that he could sleep, for that matter, even if one in particular stood out as a sure-fire means of managing it.

Reaching for his wand, Harry hesitated for only a split second before picking it up. It felt strangely heavy in his hand, loaded with more than just the lightness of wood and feather. "It's fine," he said, heaving himself from his seat. "I'll study with Draco or something."

Hermione opened her mouth to reply but caught herself before she spoke. Like Ron, she had more than likely come to terms with Harry openly studying with Draco. Not quite frequently, but every so often in the common room at night after they'd been kicked out of the library, he found himself drifting to the table Draco set himself up at. They couldn't sit as they usually did, not in the company of their classmates and not with the temporary limitation Draco had set upon them, but there was comfort in proximity. Reassurance only added to by the bumping of knees, the murmured exchange in which Harry would pose a question or Draco would comment, to receive a like-minded muted reply.

Hermione had been quietly pleased at first. Quietly approving. With weeks of such recurrences, she didn't say a word about it anymore. Ron was a little harder to read, but he didn't complain. He didn't caution Harry to keep away from 'the Slytherins' anymore, or to watch his back, just in case. "He's actually alright to study with" was Harry's usual explanation, to which Hermione often repeated that he was "really quite smart, you know", but after a time Ron didn't seem to need even that.

When Harry picked up his discarded books, however, sparing a final glance and goodnight to his friends, he was met by the now-anticipated narrowing of Ron's eyes – not a glare, and not accusing, but considering. Harry was reminded, not for the first time, of their Witching Hour discussion on Christmas night; he didn't clarify, didn't comment, but he remembered. Sometimes, he had to wonder how much of that conversation Ron remembered, too.

Not that it really mattered. In the grand scheme of things, Ron wasn't annoyed anymore, and Hermione was only ever accepting. That was good enough for Harry, and with a final nod at each of them, he left them to seek their beds and crossed the almost empty common room to the desk where Draco sat.

Pansy had filled the seat across from him earlier that evening, but she'd already left for bed. There were only a pair of other students remaining in the common room, respectively staring blindly at nothing and attempting to pick through their notes and textbooks with more compulsive page-turning than actual reading. Draco was the only one who looked to be properly working. He was 'quite smart', just as Hermione always said, but it was more than that. He was studious. He was committed. Tenacious and resilient – at least with his studies.

_Probably outside of it too, _Harry had thought on more than one occasion, and he was only beginning to see evidence of that the more time they spent together. The more frequently they paused in their studies to talk in a quiet exchange about nothing in particular. Just to talk. Just to ask about what hadn't been asked before, what hadn't been realised, and what had been realised but not fully comprehended. Less often these days those exchanged were dotted with teasing and witty remarks. Less often they were about the act of the exchange itself. It became more than that, more than bantering and joking. More about learning and understanding, exploring what Harry had never before considered exploring.

"What's your favourite colour? And if you say green, I swear I'm going to hit you."

"If you could play anything but a seeker in quidditch, what would you play?"

"So, you actually like Potions? It's not just because it was taken by Snape?"

Trivialities that had never mattered before, but seemed so much more important when Harry sat with Draco. When he hauled himself from the dry parchment of textbooks and essays and turned to regard Draco sidelong where he worked with unrelenting studiousness, the small crease evident between his eyebrows, the line of his jaw held just a little tightly, his hand sweepingly fluidly as it crossed the page and left cursive handwriting in its wake.

Harry found, quite unexpectedly, that he could watch Draco unendingly and not grow tired of it. There were little things, little features and little twitches, that he'd never noticed before. Things that had never mattered but now felt utterly integral in compiling who Draco was.

How his lip curled in a shadowed impression of his old sneer when he came across a fact, an explanation, an error that didn't sit right.

The way he would always sit with such rigidly straight posture, but every so often would sag as though deflated, take a brief respite, before resetting himself as though an unspoken reminder nudged him to straighten once more.

He clicked his tongue when he was frustrated. He preferred black ink over blue. He made a habit of wearing a shirt beneath his shirt, because he hated being cold as much as Harry did. Cheese upset his stomach, but only sometimes, and he wasn't overly fond of sweets, and always had his tea without sugar and only a drip of milk. When he slept – if he managed to sleep – he would sometimes mutter unintelligible words, as though making up for his hours of silence during the day.

And in his sleep, when he had nightmares that didn't quite succeed in waking him, he would roll towards Harry, unconsciously wrap his arms around him, and bury his face into his shoulder. The nightmares didn't strike twice those nights.

"What do you dream about? Your worst dreams?"

"Do you think you'll ever visit your parents? If you're allowed to, would you?"

"If you could go back, what would you change? What would you do differently? Would you even want to?"

Those questions fell a little harder, and just as much because Draco more often than not asked all but identical ones in return. Harry hadn't spoken to Ron and Hermione, to Ginny or anyone else, about any of that. Not to the Ministry-appointed therapist that visited the school on regular occasions, either. He hardly let himself think of the answer to those questions – but in the dark depths of the library, alone but for Draco and comfortably at ease in the close contact of skin to skin, chest to chest, arms often embracing, it felt okay. It was alright. It wasn't so impossible, nor so heartbreaking, to voice aloud.

And it helped. As much as anything else, talking and being with Draco – it helped.

When Harry slipped silently into the chair at Draco's side, that helped, too. It became just a little less painful to hold his wand, because there was something else drawing his attention. The threat of the exams the next day was still looming, but it was momentarily smothered in the severity of its threat. Draco had questioned – weeks ago, months before – if Harry's liking might not be the same as his own, and that might be true. It could very well be different. But Harry liked Draco and the glow of comfort he radiated. He liked it more than simply 'liking' could describe.

As Harry set his textbooks on the desk at Draco's side, dropping into the spare seat, Draco paused in his writing. What he was writing – still writing, even the night before his Potions exam – would have once baffled Harry, but not anymore. He'd asked, and he'd looked, and he saw the lines repeating and reworking pages of studious notetaking to force facts into memory that Draco reinforced over and over again. It wasn't how Harry would have approached it, wasn't how he now did, but it worked for Draco. He had a perseverance that would have left Harry stunned years before.

Not anymore. It seemed perfectly suitable for him these days.

The line between Draco's eyebrows seemed to have become all but permanently settled. His jaw had been locked for so many hours that evening that it was probably aching. Disregarding that he might be seen, what Su Li at the table behind them might think if she happened to glance up, Harry reached for Draco's face and prodded his chin. As thought released like a clasp, Draco's lips parted around a sigh.

He sat back in his chair, posture still rigid but slightly less than it had been. The hand not still holding his quill rose to his face to knead the bridge of his nose, and the crease between his brows easing slightly.

"You've been going for four hours straight," Harry murmured, dropping his hand back to the table. His leg settled against Draco's, though, lightly and without demand. Draco adjusted his own immediately against him.

"It hasn't been four hours straight," Draco replied.

"Yeah, it has. Your two seconds to eat the dinner I brought you –"

"It wasn't only two seconds."

Harry raised his eyebrows. "Really? I think you could compete against a Vanishing Charm with how quickly you put it away. Did you actually get a stomach ache?"

Draco rolled his eyes, but a touch of a smile played across his lips. He opened his mouth to reply but paused as a shuffle of motion bespoke Su rising to her feet behind them. Harry didn't turn towards her, only half registering her suggested, "Mandy, I'm turning in. Are you coming?" Their mutual departure a moment later, however, was noteworthy for the emptiness it left in the dormitory behind them.

As soon as the sound of footsteps faded completely, Harry reached for Draco's hand. He eased the quill out from between his fingers and, as had become something of a habit, smoothed his fingers over Draco's fingertips. The impressions of the quill were so deeply inset that they could have been permanent, even though Harry knew from checking that they would fade overnight before being repressed again in the next bout of studying.

"We should probably go to bed," Harry said, though, as ever, he doubted how much that just occupying a bed would help to promote sleep.

"Maybe," Draco said, which translated to 'not yet'.

"Soon?"

"Soon."

Harry nodded. He wasn't going to study anymore. He knew he wouldn't, and not only because he was tired. For all that Draco's studiousness was motivation enough, Harry was neither a good nor an avid studier himself. Reading printed words simply didn't work for him in the same way that it did for people like Draco and Hermione.

Instead, he offered Draco's hand back to him, folded his arms on the desk before him, and dropped his head down on top of them. Facing his direction, he watched as Draco regarded him in return, frowning slightly, before slowly picking up his quill once more. He didn't start writing again, though.

"What's wrong?" Draco asked.

Harry blinked heavily. "What?"

"You're worried about something."

"Isn't it obvious?"

Draco's frown deepened. The feather twirled in agitated spins between his fingers. "I meant something else. Something in particular." His gaze flickered to where Harry knew he'd left his wand, abandoned before him and as melancholically useless as it had been for months. "Are you worrying about the spellwork?"

Harry closed his eyes, pressing his leg a little more firmly against Draco's. They'd discussed it before – Harry's magic, his reluctance, and that it mirrored but wasn't identical to Draco's own feelings on the matter. They weren't the same, not quite, because for all that Draco might commiserate with the feelings casting a spell could incite, he wouldn't stop using magic. Not even a little. It was and always had been a part of his life so completely that to stop would be akin to starving himself of water. Impossible, and inevitably fatal.

In a lot of ways, Harry wished he felt just a little of that same compulsion. In others, the possibility of such a necessity was terrifying.

"It's not like I can do anything about it," Harry murmured, his voice muffled a little by the crook of his arm. "It's just a little bit depressing that it basically means I've already failed my NEWTs."

"There's no assurance of that," Draco said.

"I'm pretty sure actually using magic is a pretty big part of the exams, Draco."

"Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise me if some considerations were made, given your circumstances. It wouldn't even surprise me if you weren't the only one to have this problem."

"You're being generous."

Draco snorted quietly. "Have you ever known me to be a generous person?"

Harry opened his eyes, staring up at him. "Yes," he said simply.

Draco didn't reply. Not with words. The line between his eyebrows eased further, however, almost disappearing entirely. Twisting in his seat, he nudged Harry's knee gently with his own, tipping his head in a beckoning gesture.

Harry didn't need words to comprehend what he said. He shook his head slightly, turning his face to bury it in his arms. "It's fine," he said. "You don't have to. These seats are heaps more uncomfortable than the library ones for doing that."

"Do you think I care?" Draco said.

"You should. It'll be distracting for you."

"Do you mean the fact that you're sitting in my lap or that the chair will be slightly more uncomfortable than it already is?" When Harry didn't reply, Draco nudged him with his knee again, more insistently this time. "Come on. You're sitting there quietly depressed, and it's making me even more stressed than I already am. Don't do this to my blood pressure, Harry."

Harry laughed into the fold of his arms, but it didn't last long, sighing into silence almost immediately. Maybe he was a feeling down that evening, but he wouldn't distract Draco to alleviate it a little. Priorities lay where they did, and since Harry had come to properly understand just what kind of distraction climbing into Draco's lap created – it wasn't fair. "Yeah, well, sitting in your way and distracting you won't make it any easier for you."

"Will it help you?" Draco asked. "Will it make you feel any better?"

"You already know it –"

"Well, it helps me too, believe it or not." When Harry peered up at him, he frowned. "Don't look at me like that. It actually does. Don't think you're the only one getting something other than sex out of all of this. I know what I said before, and I know you've been thinking about it, but that's not it. That's not only it. So get you're skinny arse over here, and we might both actually feel slightly better about everything."

When Draco loosely grasped his elbow, Harry lifted his head. He couldn't help but smile slightly. When they'd first had sex, Harry had properly realised for the first time just what kind of an effect their agreement had upon Draco. Realising hadn't quite changed things – as much because Draco said that nothing had really been changed in the first place – but it had been playing on Harry's mind. Even when his mind was stuffed to overflowing with every other concern, it had niggled at him.

Draco flicked aside the concern with a pointed comment and the arch of an eyebrow. When he tugged gently upon Harry's elbow, Harry's feeble resistance crumbled in quick compliance. Climbing into Draco's lap was so easy, so natural, that he felt the previously unnoticed tension tight in his body release almost immediately. It was enough that, dropping his chin to Draco's shoulder, his eyes slid closed within seconds.

The touching, the kisses, the sex – it was incredible. Better than good. But for Harry, those quiet moments in between that seemed to smother his nagging concerns were just as wonderful.

"Better?" Draco asked, his words a low murmur in Harry's ear.

Harry hummed in reply. He didn't have to speak. All he needed was to wrap his arms around Draco's waist, press himself as close to him as he could get without climbing into his robes, and breathe. Everything felt just a little better when he managed that.

And, for all that he was stressed himself, and exhausted, and likely made more uncomfortable by Harry's weight upon him in the rigid chairs, Draco wrapped his arms around him in return and held him back. Harry noticed that, despite the threat of an exam less than ten hours away, Draco didn't begin writing again for a long time after.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

His chest seized, squeezing and convulsing, even as his hand released its grip on his wand. He was only distantly aware of the sound of it clattering to the ground at his side. Of greater importance was the thundering of his heartbeat in his ears, his tightened throat, the fading blurriness of vision reminiscent of seeing without his glasses but darker, darkening, juxtaposing sharp flares of too bright and too fuzzy.

"Mr. Potter… Potter, can you...?"

He could just make out the words through the hollow _thu-thud, thu-thud, thu-thud _in his ears. Heard them as distantly as the dropping of his wand. But those words were negligible. Unimportant. Of far less concern than the squeezing pressure, the numbing tingle in his fingers, the ragged gasping of his breath -

And the dead body in the room.

He didn't want to look at it. Didn't want to think of it. Didn't want to recall his instinctive response, the sight of the illusionary figure morphing into a noseless face, pale and snake-like, red-eyed and hateful. He couldn't let himself dwell on his own flinching response, the jerk of his wand hand, the spell surging to his lips and flying free in a beam of ruddy light.

Not the way the magic looked. Not how it felt.

Not the colour of it as it struck the dark-robed figure, illuminating it in red as though it was on fire.

Not the way that, as that figure writhed as though truly burning, convulsing before slumping to the floor, its face morphed again into something else. Someone else. Someone recognised on sight, and someone he knew all too well.

Fred.

Sirius.

Lupin.

Tonks, Lavender Brown, and Colin Creevy. Dumbledore, Snape, and Moody. Flashes of others, tripping over one another, mingling across the blank slate of the shapeless body in a sickening skew of features. It evolved into Death Eaters he recognised who had stood at the end of his wand. Snatchers. Classmates who had turned. Hated faces, as hated as Voldemort - Bellatrix, Greyback - and even those who weren't so hated but were still enemies. Those who'd been opposed to him only for being on the other side of the war.

Crabbe.

Pansy.

Narcissa and Lucius.

Draco.

He couldn't look past that. Not anymore. Not when he saw Draco's face, contorted in an expression of pain that Harry had never properly beheld but what looked far t. Foo real, far too believable, and fitting, and likely. That it could have been so close, that he could have - would have - shot to impede, disable, even to kill - it could have happened.

"Mr. Potter, I need you to…"

It could have been any of them. Any of his friends if he hadn't been fast enough. Any of his enemies who had become less than enemies if he'd been faster.

"... a deep breath. Come now, a deep breath. With me: in… and out… In… and out…"

He realised he was on his knees. On his knees and hunched to the floor, forehead to the marble stone beneath him. He registered that his hands pressed against his face, fighting the urge to gouge out his eyes but pressing tightly against them all the same. He felt himself struggle for breath, then felt the moment that struggle tripped into slighter ease before the coaching of the instructor, the director - the examiner? - and slowly, slightly, just enough, his chest began to feel less as though it were being crushed by a giant's hand.

It still hurt, though. Not so much his chest, but everything else.

"That's better. Good, that's good. Just slow, steady… good."

He took a shaking breath. Another. It stung a little, raking down his throat that felt stripped raw. Slowly, fighting the urge to cling to his face forever, to bury himself from his own thoughts, he slid his hands down from his eyes and rolled his head sideways in the direction of the voice.

He'd lost his glasses somewhere. He didn't know where, didn't really care. He could see the examiner well enough, though. Enough to recognise her as not one of Those faces. Not one of Those people, the ones who had stood at the end of his wand or behind what feeble protection he could provide. The ones who he should have protected but couldn't. Not a face that he saw at night, pleading with him, or begging, or simply staring.

A round face. Solemn. Dark eyes and dark hair. There was no visible concern, no wrinkled frown or tight eyes, but he felt it anyway. Her understanding.

"Are you with me, Mr. Potter?"

Gordon. He remembered now. Harry remembered being introduced to her - how long ago? Not long but it felt like forever. Examiner Gordon. Examiner for… for Defence. Facts dribbled together, coagulated, and Harry clung to them like a lifeline, hauling him away from the assaulting thoughts, the frenzied memories.

With a grunt, he pushed himself up onto his hands, rocking back onto his heels. His arms trembled slightly, and rather than glance back in the direction of the body across the room, Harry focused his attention upon steadying them.

"So foolish," Gordon muttered, and Harry flinched before he realised she wasn't talking to him at all. "I knew this would be a bad idea. Really, what did they expect? From people who had only just been through a war, what did they…?"

Harry peered at her sidelong. Her solemn expression had shifted slightly, enough that her agitation and frustration crept forth. She caught his glance and huffed, folding her arms. "You're not the first person to have this issue, Mr. Potter. Not even the fifth."

Harry nodded.

"We'll be chasing this up. Be assured that it won't affect your results."

Harry bit his lip, lowering his gaze. His exam. Fuck, he didn't care a wit about his exam. All that mattered at that moment was getting as far away from the boggart he'd been forced to face, from the image of his failure, as he possibly could.

Nodding, he swallowed before attempting to speak. "Can - can I leave now?"

The words still came out in a croak but loud enough for the examiner to interpret. She nodded curtly, pointing wordlessly towards a door across the room, opposite to the one Harry had entered through.

He didn't need to be told twice. All but scrambling to his feet, Harry fled from the hall. His legs wavered, his steps stumbled, but he didn't slow. When he burst through the door, he didn't look back.

* * *

The waiting room on the tail end of the exams was almost identical to that at the beginning. It was provide to 'preserve academic integrity', the examiners had told the attendees on the first day, as though any of them cared enough about formalities to question the logistics of the process. Or at least Harry didn't.

It was the same room he'd been in several times already, following previous exams. A box of a room, sparsely filled with seating from cushioned couches to hard-backed chairs. The only real difference it held from its twin on the other side of the exam hall was the people in it. Rather than tense and quivering with nerves, it was as though the fight had been drained from them all. Bodies leaning against walls, slumped into chairs, heads hanging and faces lax.

Harry barely saw the room as he crossed the threshold. He barely saw the faces either but to register them, some minute, still-lucid part of his mind tagging them with a name. Neville. Padma. Michael. Terry.

"Harry?" someone asked, and _Hermione_ that lucid part of his mind provided. "Oh, God. Harry, are you alright?"

Harry glanced in the direction of her voice, saw her face only hazily, but didn't slow in his still stumbling entrance. He saw faces turn towards him, pale and exhausted. Parvati. Seamus. Susan. All only vaguely attentive, vaguely curious as they struggled to conjure the energy after a gruelling trial.

Su, eyes heavy.

Mandy, her hair askew.

Pansy, lips thin but not held tightly enough to hide their faint quivering.

Draco.

Harry's scan jerked to a stop. Draco was half a room away, just as exhausted as the rest of them. Maybe even more given that, just like Harry he'd barely slept in the past week. Haggard. Pale. Shadows under his eyes. Harry caught his eyes, held it, and –

_He lay on the ground, face deathly pale and cast in an expression of lax shock. Lips bloodless, eyes glassy, the flickering flames of magic that shouldn't have sprouted from an _Expelliarmus _licking at his robes. One arms was flung wide, hand flopped upward, fingers curled, utterly still._

_Nothing. Nothing left. No life. No more than all those who had preceded it, up to and including Voldemort, and infinitely more horrifying. He was – Draco was –_

"Harry?" Someone – Hermione – stood close, voice thin and strained. "Maybe you should sit down. You don't look well at all. I know, it was a horrible –"

Harry didn't hear what else she said. Maybe she said nothing more anyway. Lurching forward, he all but flew across the room towards Draco, half aware that Draco stepped towards him in return but otherwise oblivious. He knew Draco wasn't dead. Even seeing the boggart, he'd known. Just as he'd known he couldn't have done anything else for anyone who had died, and that he hadn't been the one to kill the Death Eaters that appeared before him.

But it still hurt. He still felt that he should have done more. Harry hadn't known it was possible to hurt so much for something that hadn't happened.

A strangled whimper made its way through the roaring in his ears, and Harry knew detachedly that it came from himself. He didn't care. He didn't care that it was pathetic, that it may seem weak, that those around him would have likely been more than a little stunned to hear it. Just as he didn't care that he was very likely being watched as he crashed into Draco and clung to him, arms locking around him crushingly tight and face seeking the solace of his shoulder. Eyes closing, struggling for breath, Harry held Draco like it was the only thing keeping him upright. It probably was.

Draco's arms wrapped around him in return. An engulfing embrace, warmer than a blanket and infinitely more comforting, a hint of a whimper managed its way from Harry's lips once more. It didn't matter if it was simply because he needed to touch – someone, anyone – or if it was because it was _Draco_, and for a moment he was _Harry's_, and _here_, and _alive_. It could have been a bit of both reasons.

He smelt of Draco – clean robes, the hint of his sweat, a touch of peppermint toothpaste.

He felt of him – so warm, thin and lean, but more than strong enough that his caging arms seemed a barrier from any rearing horror chasing Harry's thoughts.

When he murmured in Harry's ear, his voice was so distinctly his, his words so innately Draco's that Harry released a shuddering sigh that was almost a laugh. "This exam is the biggest load of shit."

"Mm," Harry hummed, small and short.

"Which one was it? Was it the -?"

"Boggart."

"Me too."

"Thought so."

"Such a shit."

"Absolute bullshit."

"Who writes these exams?"

Harry's stilted laugh was little more than another sigh, edged with hysteria and not really amused. It didn't really matter. Nothing did but Draco's hold around him, that he maintained that hold and somehow manoeuvred them to the nearest chair. The easy familiarity of following Draco's unspoken suggestion, climbing into his lap and hooking his legs on either side of Draco's, was so soothing, such a constant, that the stuttering hitch of Harry's heartbeat, the short sharpness of his breaths, abruptly eased.

He pressed his face into Draco's shoulder once more, adjusting his arms around his neck instead. He shivered slightly as Draco adjusted his own, holding him against him until there wasn't even a breath of space between them. The sound of murmured voices swirled around them – Hermione, Harry detected, and others, someone else, many someones – but he didn't hear their words. He didn't care what they said, what they thought. It was enough that he could feel Draco's heartbeat beating almost in time with his own, their breathing slipping into synchrony. His eyes squeezed shut became simply closed, and the clutching grasp of his fingers onto the back of Draco's robes a tight hold but no longer trembling.

It didn't fix everything. Harry didn't think anything could. But it soothed like a cool balm on a burn. It helped just a little, but increasingly with every second. Slowly, with reluctant retreat, the abrasive threat of all that the boggart represented faded. Not gone, but sidelined. Not erased but filed back into the depths of Harry's mind from whence it came.

Not perfect, not healed, but better. It helped even more that, so close to Draco, he could feel his own tension ease slightly, too.

The door opened and closed. Voices still murmured. Bodies edged around the room. Harry barely noticed any of it. He didn't care. Not until Ginny's voice permeated the heavy fog settling on his mind.

"Well, that's… I guess that's one way to distract from the end of a horrifying exam."

Draco's fingers twitched on Harry's back. They threaded into his shirt, bunching, then loosened. It was that as much as Ginny's comment, no louder than anyone else's words but somehow distinctly heard, that heaved his heavy head from Draco's shoulder and had him glancing behind himself.

He turned just in time to see Ron step into the room, but he caught only a glimpse of Ron's pale face, freckles stark, as he caught his eye. That sickening horror morphed into raised eyebrows and rapid blinks. His gaze flicked to Ron's side, to where Ginny still stood just inside the door, a curious expression of narrowed eyes but a faint smile on her lips. Hermione stood right beside them, her own curiosity muted but still apparent.

It was only then that Harry really noticed the rest of the room, and he unconsciously loosened his arms around Draco. Only then that he saw Pansy staring at them with an unwavering gaze, saw Neville and Hannah sparing them intermittent glances as they whispered to one another, noticed Seamus openly staring with amusement brightening the weary lines of his face.

Harry didn't know how long it had been since he'd first stepped into the room himself. He wasn't sure how long after that Draco had directed them to the uncomfortable wooden chair they sat on and Harry had climbed into his lap for everyone to see. Enough that most of the examinees had filled the room, but apparently not long enough for him and Draco to become less than the unanimous focus of attention.

Draco was slightly tense beneath him, but a glance his way found him unconcerned. Sincerely unconcerned, that was, not simply hiding his discomfort behind blank-faced aloofness. It took that glimpse to notice that, by and large, Harry felt the same. Suspended in a state of exhaustion, no longer nauseous and horrified himself, not struggling for breath and fighting the urge to tear his eyes out but wrung dry nonetheless, he didn't really care. He cared even less when Ron's shrug caught his attention again.

"Well, this wasn't exactly what I'd expected," he said, his words invoking a lull from the majority of the room, "but I can't say I'm completely surprised. You could've picked someone a little less damaging to my mental health, though, mate."

Hermione's eyebrows snapped up as she swung towards him, and Ginny followed suit with a slow turn of open-faced bemusement. They weren't the only ones; even Pansy took a pause from her staring to glance his way.

"I think it's nice," Luna said, drifting from where Harry hadn't even noticed her to Ginny's side. She smiled dopely at Harry. "You suit one another."

"But _do _they?" Ginny asked emphatically, if not quite critically.

Harry thought that Ron replied, though with words or something else he wasn't sure. He caught it as he instinctively turned back towards Draco and took in the slight frown on his forehead, the tug of his lips to the side, and felt the minute shift of his hands around his waist.

"I think so," Harry murmured, though for Draco's ears alone. Almost surprising himself – for barely an hour before it had been the furthest thing from his mind – he managed a smile.

Draco glanced towards him, eyes darting upwards. Instantly, the frown on his forehead smoothed and the tug of his lips drew into a smile instead. A faint smile, smaller than it usually would be in mirroring Harry's, but it was enough. More than enough to be sure that he was okay, that in this instance at least, his scepticism of Harry's friends wasn't a problem. Maybe, in the aftermath of what felt so insurmountably much worse, it truly wasn't.

It wasn't for a performance that Harry kissed Draco an instant later. He'd wanted to since he gained enough presence of mind to separate the warmth of Draco's embrace from the thought of Draco himself. He'd wanted to touch him, to taste him, to feel the warm reassurance of Draco's lips that held the same soothing undertones as his closeness, as the coil of his arms around Harry. He just hadn't considered it to be a possibility; not now, and not before a live audience.

It wasn't a performance, but it felt a little bit like it when, as soon as their lips touched, someone whooped. A shout followed, then a wolf whistle, and even a scattering of claps. It was so far removed from the stage of horror being performed in the adjacent room that it was almost jarring, but…

Harry had always loved Draco's kisses. Ever since the first. He'd always loved his warm, the comfort and security of being close to him. His head still ached a little from the trial of the morning exam, but for a moment it was as though he ducked out of those aches and pains to sink into Draco and swallow his kiss – one, two, a deeper one and the parting of lips to follow.

It wasn't quite how Draco had specified it would be. How it should be. But to the backdrop of a clamouring room torn from grief, pain, and exhaustion, the moment felt as good as any other.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

Harry didn't know what woke him up. It could have been a sound, or some sixth sense. It could have been nothing at all.

That he was waking at all wasn't quite as unexpected as it had been only a week ago. In such a short time, the calamitous mayhem that was the entire NEWTs process had vanished. The build-up had been so great, the performance so short and overwhelming, that the aftermath felt more like the calm in the middle of the storm, a brief respite before the chaos began once more.

But it didn't start again. It was over. Over, and leaving destruction in its wake and those stumbling out the other side picking through the splintered remains of what that storm had broken shattered.

For Harry, it meant sleep. A lot of sleep. He hadn't really thought he could manage it, but the opportunity was there and he managed it. There wasn't any excuse anymore, nothing to tie his hands and keep him up until past midnight with lies of study and productivity. The focus had shifted from narrowed commitment to wide, vague relaxation.

The prospect was nothing if not daunting. How did anyone even wind down enough to relax anymore?

Hermione wasn't managing so well. Harry knew she still took herself to the library far too often for someone who had finished her exams, and he found her still buried in books more often than not. Ron joined her on occasion, but he was spending more time at the quidditch pitch than he'd been able to before. He and Ginny had taken to one another's company with more jovial commitment than Harry had ever seen of them before, and it was such an unexpected delight to witness that he almost wasn't sad when he couldn't bring himself to join them himself. At least not yet.

They weren't the only one, on both ends of the spectrum. Harry watched with silent curiosity as his classmates, people he had known for nearly half his life, shifted and shuffled, adjusting into the newfound liberty they abruptly found themselves in. Some left the school immediately, returning to their families as was permitted of them, or leaping upon the opportunity to seek a vacation. Parvati and Padma had disappeared almost the hour after their final examination, and many had followed shortly afterwards.

But the rest…

What afflicted the senior students bore a remarkable resemblance to the adjustment of unnerved and yet blessedly relieved survivors of war. A resemblance, but without the added weight of grief. Seamus' laughter rung through the Dragon's Nest whenever he was in the common room like a sporadic yet frequent tune. Susan had established a morning tea gathering of sorts in the Great Hall for anyone who chose to join. Neville had taken to wearing dirt-smeared slacks and boots, carrying a pair of gardening gloves wherever he went, as he dove into Professor Sprouts Herbology labs to tinker with the greenery within as a near-constant pastime.

People were changing. Adapting. Recovering, even, and the ease on the faces of Harry's friends and classmates, the smiles that replaced frowns and hard lines, was an unexpected sort of wonderful.

For Harry, too. He knew he was changing, if only slightly and slowly. It was nothing deliberate, but there was a distinct sense of recovery to be found in the aftermath of school stress, an affliction that only a year before he would never have seen himself prioritising. For the most part, that took the form of sleep. And where Harry found sleep was, unerringly, with Draco.

When Harry found himself waking of an afternoon, wandering idly from the depths of slumber in an incremental climb that contemplated the inevitable endpoint with every step of the way, he became aware of Draco. Or more aware, as it were; he was never unaware of him, not when they lay together. He felt the warmth of Draco's body draped around him, held loosely in his arms that, even in sleep, maintained their clasp. He heard the sounds of his smooth breathing, breaths that weren't precisely different from anyone else's but that Harry was certain he could pick out from a line up. He felt and almost heard the soft, heavy thumps of Draco's heartbeat, only a few layers of skin and bone from Harry's own, with its constant, muted litany of reassurance, closeness, and realness.

Sleeping with Draco provided that same comfort that Harry had first pursued at the beginning of his school year when he had so instinctively sought Draco's lap. The comfort that he hadn't known he'd needed until he had it.

Even before opening his eyes, Harry was aware. When he shifted slightly, Draco shifted too, his breath hitching slightly, and Harry's hand drifted instinctively to the back of Draco's head. He grazed his fingers through his hair and, curling like a cat into the gentle touch, Draco's momentary, sleep-bound disturbance vanished.

Smiling to himself, Harry opened his eyes. He was groggy, his vision blurry even with his glasses still in place, but he could make out Draco's head where it rested on his shoulder. They'd take possession of the couch that afternoon, a habit that was growing in frequency every day for the past week and seemed to have become a generally accepted possessiveness throughout the tower. Not that Harry cared about being accepted – even outside of the desperate need for comfort after his Defence exam, he found he didn't really care – but it was nice that the offering of a consistent space was given.

For whatever reason, it felt more comfortable than the bed, even if it was something of a tight fit for the both of them. Extended across all three of the cushions, Draco lay half on top and to the side of Harry, slightly wedged against the back. His legs tangled with Harry's own, his arms firmly and instinctively wrapped, and even if his head was at a bit of an awkward angle between the cushion and Harry's shoulder, he looked comfortable. Certainly more comfortable than he'd been before the NEWTs.

The shadows under his eyes were gone, Harry noticed as he gazed down at him, sleep retreating and taking its blurriness with it. The tension in his face had eased, too; not completely, and maybe it wouldn't ever leave, but it had certainly lessened. Draco had even taken to smiling more, and not just in Harry's company; when he'd first laughed at the Little Head table, Ron – seated across from him – had promptly dropped his fork. He hadn't been the only one to stare in stunned stupefaction, either.

It was nice. Draco was getting better, recovering from both the weighty trial of NEWTs and the horror that had preceded it. Results might not have been returned yet, and there hadn't been any kind of miraculous heal-all for his problems, but he would get the chance to recover. _They _had the chance.

Harry was so distracted with gazing down at Draco, silently drawing his fingers through his fine hair, that he didn't even notice they were being watched until Pansy shifted a shuffling step. It didn't bother him to be observed as it once would have – he and Draco had borne such study almost constantly in the past week – but he was a little surprised.

Glancing up at her, Harry met Pansy's gaze for only a brief moment before her own dropped to Draco. Or returned to Draco, as was more likely. She was one of the few that Harry hadn't noticed had significantly eased in relentless tension with the passing of exams; while Blaise seemed to have grown a little more comfortable, even edging slightly away from his self-imposed ostracism, Pansy hadn't. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

It was a little sad, when Harry thought about it. Draco was changing, and Blaise was changing. Everyone in the rest of their year group was growing and climbing the impossible mountain towards some thin promise of recovery. Even Harry, though he wasn't quite sure what 'recovery' looked like. He didn't think he needed to know, or at least not yet; he could dawdle, and in dawdling he could revel in sharing Draco's company and absorbing the comfort of that company that had grown to mean so much to him in the past year.

But Pansy was different. As she stared down at Draco with her face blank and eyes unblinking, Harry couldn't help but feel a little sad for her. Not pity – he didn't think he could consider such a thing, not for Pansy – but definitely sadness. Even Draco was changing, but Pansy…

"I've never seen him so relaxed," she murmured, so quietly that, had Harry not already been conscious, he doubted it would have bothered him into wakefulness. Pansy shook her head slowly. "Not even before everything that happened."

Harry didn't slow in carding his fingers through Draco's hair. When he replied, his words were as hushed as Pansy's. "Then I'm glad."

"How do you do it?" Pansy asked.

How had been the question, but Harry heard more than that. He heard why. He heard why you, and why now, and maybe even 'why not me?' Possibly, it could have been something other than that entirely: why can't I be like that? She was still struggling, visibly torn between clinging to a past that had hurt so badly she couldn't yet contemplate recovery and her longing to step forward. That, too, was sad to see.

"I don't know," Harry said quietly. "Just that… it helps."

"You do?"

"Mm." Not a yes or a no, but something neutral. Harry wasn't sure himself. "Maybe it's sort of how he helps me. Something as little as… touching. And being close." Harry nodded slightly, his chin lightly brushing over Draco's hair. "Something like that. It helps."

Pansy's scoff somehow didn't sound like a scoff. More like a sigh, almost a silent whimper of longing. Shaking her head, she drew her gaze sidelong, skimming across the empty common room. It took her a moment to gather herself, to shake aside whatever conflict lay within her just beneath the surface, and when she turned back to Harry there was a hint of her usual aloof and slightly contemptuous confidence.

"Well," she said, sniffing, "I'd rather it wasn't you. Definitely not you. But if you can make him like that…" She shrugged a little too emphatically to pass as casual. "I hope you two are very happy together."

Without another word, she swept away, past and behind the couch and out of sight. Head slightly tipped, Harry listened to the sound of her footsteps as she made her way up to the girls dormitory. His hand didn't slow in its gentle ministrations of Draco's hair. The comfortable silence left in Pansy's wake hadn't really been disturbed in the first place.

"Was that Pansy?"

Draco's voice, a murmur so skewed and muted it was barely words at all, hummed against Harry's shoulder. He glanced down at him, at Draco's face still lax with sleep. "It's nothing," he said, lips brushing over the top of Draco's head in a feather light kiss. "Go back to sleep."

Draco grunted. "Good. Was never awake in the first place."

Harry smiled. He adjusted his hold around Draco as he felt Draco take a slightly deeper breath before releasing it in an exhale of heavy sleepiness. In seconds, any hint of wakefulness disappeared. Just like Harry, and quite without realising until only recently, Draco really did seem to get more out of the touching, the holding, the closeness, than just the prospect of sex. In hindsight, Harry didn't know why he'd ever thought otherwise.

It was a bit of a mystery that he'd made the discovery at all. Both for Draco and for himself, for that matter. But, closing his eyes and letting himself sink into the comfortable warmth of closeness, sliding into sleep that would otherwise be all but impossible, Harry could be nothing but thankful for the accident that had led to it in the first place. He'd made many such discoveries that year, but this was by far the greatest.

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A/N: Thank you so much for reading! An extra special thanks to all of the lovely people who have left reviews. I honestly can't say how much it means to me to hear from you and know what you think. If you've got a second or two, please let me know what you thought of the story.  
Other than that, until next time! xx


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